d tell him that his own son was just
so steadfast as ever he was, and plenty other women's sons also.

No. VIII

THE HOUND'S POOL

By day the place was inviting enough and a child wouldn't have feared to
be there. Dean Burn came down from its cradle far away in the hills and
threaded Dean Woods with ripple and flash and song. The beck lifted its
voice in stickles and shouted over the mossy apron of many a little
waterfall; and then under the dark of the woods it would go calm, nestle
in a backwater here and there, then run on again. And of all fine spots on
a sunny day the Hound's Pool was finest, for here Dean Burn had scooped a
hole among the roots of forest trees and lay snug from the scythe of the
east wind, so that the first white violet was always to be found upon the
bank and the earliest primrose also. In winter time, when the boughs above
were naked, the sun would glint upon the water; and sometimes all would be
so still that you could hear a vole swimming; and then again, after a
Dartmoor freshet, the stream would come down in spate, cherry-red, and
roll big waters for such a little river. And then Hound's Pool would be
like to rise over its banks and drown the woodman's path that ran beside
it and throw up sedges and dead grasses upon the lowermost boughs of the
overhanging thicket to show where it could reach sometimes.

'Twas haunted, and old folk--John Meadows among 'em--stoutly maintained
that nothing short of Doomsday would lay the spectrum, because they knew
the ancient tale of Weaver Knowles, and believed in it also; but the
legend had gone out of fashion, as old stories will, and it came as a new
and strange thing to the rising generation. 'Tis any odds the young men
and maidens would never have believed in it; but by chance it happed to be
a young man who revived the story, and as he'd seen with his own eyes, he
couldn't doubt. William Parsloe he was, under-keeper at Dean, and he told
what he'd seen to John Meadows, the head-keeper; but it weren't till he
heard old John on the subject that he knew as he'd beheld something out of
another world than his own.

The two men met where a right of way ran through the preserves--a sore
trial to the keepers and the owners also, but sacred under the law--and
Harry Wade, the returned native, as had just come back to his birthplace,
was walking along with Parsloe at the time.

The keepers were a good bit fretted and on their mettle just then, because