it, I felt myself
going down some deep passage into a pit of darkness. It was no good to
catch the sides, the whole thing seemed to go with me. Then, without
knowing how, I was leaning over a night of water.

This water was of black radiance, as are certain diamonds, spanned
across with vaults of rock, and carrying no image, neither showing marge
nor end, but centred (at it might be) with a bottomless indrawal.

With that chill and dread upon me, and the sheer rock all around, and
the faint light heaving wavily on the silence of this gulf, I must have
lost my wits and gone to the bottom, if there were any.

But suddenly a robin sang (as they will do after dark, towards spring)
in the brown fern and ivy behind me. I took it for our little Annie's
voice (for she could call any robin), and gathering quick warm comfort,
sprang up the steep way towards the starlight. Climbing back, as the
stones glid down, I heard the cold greedy wave go japping, like a blind
black dog, into the distance of arches and hollow depths of darkness.

CHAPTER IX

THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME

I can assure you, and tell no lie (as John Fry always used to say, when
telling his very largest), that I scrambled back to the mouth of that
pit as if the evil one had been after me. And sorely I repented now of
all my boyish folly, or madness it might well be termed, in venturing,
with none to help, and nothing to compel me, into that accursed valley.
Once let me get out, thinks I, and if ever I get in again, without being
cast in by neck and by crop, I will give our new-born donkey leave to
set up for my schoolmaster.

How I kept that resolution we shall see hereafter. It is enough for me
now to tell how I escaped from the den that night. First I sat down
in the little opening which Lorna had pointed out to me, and wondered
whether she had meant, as bitterly occurred to me, that I should run
down into the pit, and be drowned, and give no more trouble. But in less
than half a minute I was ashamed of that idea, and remembered how she
was vexed to think that even a loach should lose his life. And then
I said to myself, 'Now surely she would value me more than a thousand
loaches; and what she said must be quite true about the way out of this
horrible place.'

Therefore I began to search with the utmost care and diligence, although
my teeth were chattering, and all my bones beginning to ache with the
chilliness and the wetness. Before very long the