says: "Young master, I am going presently to the hill
with the sheep, and thou needest neither to go with me nor fare
a-hunting today, since the house is full of meat; so thou art free,
and were I in thy shoes I would go straight from this door down to the
water-side, and see if thou mayst not happen on something fair or
seldom seen. But hearken to my rede, if thou comest on aught such,
thou hast no need to tell of it to any one, not even to me. [And it
were not amiss to do on they coat of scarlet.]"

Osberne thanks him, and takes his bow of arrows and goes his way and
comes to the riverside and turns his face south, and goes slowly along
the very edge of the water; and the water itself drew his eyes down to
gaze on the dark green deeps and fierce downlong swirl of the stream,
with its sharp clean lines as if they were carven in steel, and the
curling and upheaval and sudden changing of the talking eddies: so
that he scarce might see the familiar greensward of the further shore.

At last, when he had gone thus more than two miles from where he first
hit the water, a long straight reach lay before him, and as he looked
down it, it seemed as if the river came presently to an end; but in
sooth there was a sharp turn to the east by which the water ran, but
narrowing much; and this narrowing was made by the thrusting forth of
the western bank into a sharp ness, which, from where Osberne now
stood, showed a wide flank facing, as it seemed, the whole hurrying
stream of the Flood. But the stream turned ere it smote the cliff, and
striving for the narrow outgate made a prodigious eddy or whirlpool
ere it might clear itself of the under-water foot of the ness and
make eastward so as to rush on toward the sea. But in the face of the
wall, in the bight where the whirlpool turned from it, was a cave the
height of a tall man, and some four feet athwart, and below it a ledge
thrust out from the sheer rock and hanging over the terrible water,
and it was but a yard wide or so. It was but ten feet above the water,
and from it to the grass above must have been a matter of forty foot.
But the ness as it thrust forth into the river rose also, so that its
crest was a score of feet higher where it went down into the water
than its base amidst the green grass. Then came the strait passage of
the water, some thirty feet across, and then the bank of the eastern
side, which, though it thrust out not, but rather was as it were
driven back by the