g hand or foot only to their games. But it
happened about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of unusual
depth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome weather, the first heat of
veritable summer come suddenly, for the body of an ancient villager
then at the point of death. In the drowsy afternoon Hyacinth awakes
Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has found at the grave-side,
among the gravel and yellow bones cast up there. He had wrested it
with difficulty from the hands of the half-crippled gravedigger, at
eighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal.

The like of it had indeed been found before, within living memory, in
this place of immemorial use as a graveyard--"Devil's penny-pieces"
people called them. Five such lay hidden already in a dark corner of
the chapel, to keep them from superstitious employment. To-day they
came out of hiding at last. Apollyon knew the use of the thing at a
glance; had put an expert hand to it forthwith; poises the [167]
discus; sets it wheeling. How easily it spins round under one's arm,
in the groove of the bent fingers, slips thence smoothly like a knife
flung from its sheath, as if for a course of perpetual motion!
Splendescit eundo: it seems to burn as it goes. It is heavier many
times than it looks, and sharp-edged. By night they have scoured and
polished the corroded surfaces. Apollyon promises Hyacinth and himself
rare sport in the cool of the evening--an evening however, as it turned
out, not less breathless than the day.

In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if for ever, the last
sorry remnant of his workman's attire, and challenged the boy to do the
same. On the moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost, and
with face turned backwards to the disk in his right hand, his whole
body, in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is about
to commit to it, he seemed--beautiful pale spectre--to shine from
within with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in the
thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old trees. And as if they
had a proper motion of their own in them, the disks, the quoits, ran,
amid the delighted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he follows,
scarcely less swift, to score the points of their contact with the
grass. Again and again they recommence, forgetful of the hours; while
the death-bell cries out harshly for the grave's occupant, and [168]
the corpse itself is borne along stealthily not far from