giving qualities; and the water is
drunk beneath the moon by old country folk for wasting and weakening
complaints. Its strength and potency have no enmity to animal life,
for the water-voles burrow in the banks and plunge with a splash in the
stream; but it seems that no vegetable thing can grow within it, for
the pool and channel are always free of weeds.

I like to stand upon the bank and watch the green water rise and dimple
to the top of the pool, and to hear it bickering away in its rusty
channel. But the beauty of the place is not a simple beauty; there is
something strange and almost fierce about the red-stained water-course;
something uncanny and terrifying about the filmy orange clouds that
stir and sway in the pool; and there sleeps, too, round the edges of
the basin a bright and viscous scum, with a certain ugly radiance, shot
with colours that are almost too sharp and fervid for nature. It seems
as though some diligent alchemy was at work, pouring out from moment to
moment this strangely tempered potion. In summer it is more bearable
to look upon, when the grass is bright and soft, when the tapestry of
leaves and climbing plants is woven over the skirts of the thicket,
when the trees are in joyful leaf. But in the winter, when all tints
are low and spare, when the pastures are yellowed with age, and the
hillside wrinkled with cold, when the alder-rods stand up stiff and
black, and the leafless tangled boughs are smooth like wire; then the
pool has a certain horror, as it pours out its rich juice, all overhung
with thin steam.

But I doubt not that I read into it some thoughts of my own; for it was
on such a day of winter, when the sky was full of inky clouds, and the
wood murmured like a falling sea in the buffeting wind, that I made a
grave and sad decision beside the red pool, that has since tinged my
life, as the orange waters tinge the pale stream into which they fall.
The shadow of that severe resolve still broods about the place for me.
How often since in thought have I threaded the meadows, and looked with
the inward eye upon the green water rising, rising, and the crowded
orange fleeces of the pool! But stern though the resolve was, it was
not an unhappy one; and it has brought into my life a firm and tonic
quality, which seems to me to hold within it something of the
astringent savour of the medicated waters, and perhaps something of
their health-giving powers as well.

II

The Des