myth in this little New England village. Although with the
uncompromising practicality of their natures the people had given it
a name so directly significant as to make it lose all poetical
glamour, and render it the very commonplace of ghastliness, it still
appealed to their imaginations.

The laws of natural fancy obtained here as everywhere else, although
in small and homely measure. The village children found no nymphs in
the trees of their New England woods. If there were fauns among them,
and the children took their pointed ears for leaves as they lay
sleeping in the undergrowth, they never knew it. They had none of
these, but they had their pond, with its unfathomable depth. They
could not give that up for any testimony of people with ropes and
grappling-hooks. Had they not sounded it in vain with farther-reaching
lines?

Not a boy in the village believed that the bottom of that famous Dead
Hole had once been touched. Jerome Edwards certainly did not. Then,
too, they had not brought his father's hat to light--or, if they had,
had made no account of it.

Some of the elders, as well as the boys, believed in their hearts
that the pond had not, after all, been satisfactorily examined, and
that Abel Edwards might still lie there. "Ever since I can remember
anything, I've heard that pond in that place 'ain't got any bottom,"
one old man would say, and another add, with triumphant conclusion,
"If he ain't there, where is he?"

That indeed was the question. All solutions of mysteries have their
possibilities in the absence of proof. No trace of Abel Edwards had
been found in the woodland where he had been working, and no trace of
him for miles around. The search had been thorough. Other ponds of
less evil repute had also been dragged, and the little river which
ran through the village, and two brooks of considerable importance in
the spring. If Able Edwards had taken his own life, the conclusion
was inevitable that his body must lie in the pond, which had always
been reported unfathomable, and might be, after all.

"The way I look at it is this," said Simon Basset one night in the
village store. He raised the index-finger of his right hand, pointed
it at the company, shook it authoritatively as he spoke, as if to
call ocular attention also to his words. "Ef Abel Edwards did make
'way with himself any other way than by jumping into the Dead Hole,
_what_ did he do with his remains? He couldn't bury himself nohow."