e--that is, the four members of our Oxford reading party--were bathing
in a deep pool in many-terraced Tees, and I was seated on a rock's edge,
drying in the September sunshine, and quoting from Clough's 'Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich':

'How to the element offering their bodies, down shooting the fall,
They mingled themselves with the flood and the force of imperious
water,'

when from the central black cauldron immediately below me appeared the
face of Sandie--our best diver--with a most curiously perturbed
expression on his countenance. I had been watching a little circlet of
foam that eddied round on the outskirts of the current, and seemed to
wink at me with a hint of hidden and evasive mystery.

Then it vanished, for Sandie's head had shattered it.

'Hello, Sandie!' I cried to him, 'what's up? It's not cramp, is it?'

He climbed out and up to where I sat on the rock above, and shook the
water from his hair.

'Ugh!' he said in disgust. 'I've just been to the bottom, and there I
swear I came across a drowned body; I felt a corpse and touched long
hair. I believe it was a woman's.' He looked at his hands in disgust,
and perceptibly shivered.

'Nonsense!' said I. 'It must have been a drowned cow or sheep, or
possibly a pony.'

'Go down and look, or rather feel for yourself,' he retorted.

'How deep down was it?' I inquired.

'Twenty feet, perhaps,' he said, 'for it's a deep pool, and I believe
the poor thing's tethered--sunk with a stone tied to her feet.'

'Surely not,' I exclaimed, 'for if it was a case of murder it would be
known.'

'Go down and see for yourself,' cried Sandie testily. 'I've had enough
of it.' Calling our other two companions I told them of Sandie's
discovery, and we came to the conclusion that it was our duty to try to
verify or disprove Sandie's assertion.

These two dived, but did not get down far enough in the water; it seemed
to me as I watched their attempts that the stream carried them too
swiftly forward, so when my turn came I dived in somewhat higher up, and
got as far down as I could in my dive, and kept on striking downwards
till I calculated I was close to the spot Sandie had indicated. Treading
the water I felt about in the amber swirl for Sandie's gruesome find,
but the circling eddy swept me onward.

Knowing my breath was all but exhausted I made a final effort, sank a
little deeper, striving against the current, and spread my hands abroad.
I touched so