st the wind, and with bearing the fathoms and fathoms of
the heavily-leaded plumb-line that lay beside me.

Fierce as the rain was, it could not raise the leaden waters of that
fearful pool, defended as they were by the steep banks of dripping yellow
clay, striped horribly here and there with ghastly uncertain green and
blue.

They said no man could fathom it; and yet all round the edges of it grew
a rank crop of dreary reeds and segs, some round, some flat, but none
ever flowering as other things flowered, never dying and being renewed,
but always the same stiff array of unbroken reeds and segs, some round,
some flat. Hard by me were two trees leafless and ugly, made, it seemed,
only for the wind to go through with a wild sough on such nights as
these; and for a mile from that place were no other trees.

True, I could not see all this at that time, then, in the dark night, but
I knew well that it was all there; for much had I studied this pool in
the day-time, trying to learn the secret of it; many hours I had spent
there, happy with a kind of happiness, because forgetful of the past. And
even now, could I not hear the wind going through those trees, as it
never went through any trees before or since? could I not see gleams of
the dismal moor? could I not hear those reeds just taken by the wind,
knocking against each other, the flat ones scraping all along the round
ones? Could I not hear, moreover, the slow trickling of the land-springs
through the clay banks?

The cold, chill horror of the place was too much for me; I had never been
there by night before, nobody had for quite a long time, and now to come
on such a night! If there had been any moon, the place would have looked
more as it did by day; besides, the moon shining on water is always so
beautiful, on any water even: if it had been starlight, one could have
looked at the stars and thought of the time when those fields were
fertile and beautiful (for such a time was, I am sure), when the cowslips
grew among the grass, and when there was promise of yellow-waving corn
stained with poppies; that time which the stars had seen, but which we
had never seen, which even they would never see again--past time!

Ah! what was that which touched my shoulder?--Yes, I see, only a dead
leaf.--Yes, to be here on this eighth of May too of all nights in the
year, the night of that awful day when ten years ago I slew him, not
undeservedly, God knows, yet how dreadful it w