A boy, slim and white as the silver birches round him, stood at the edgeof a pool, in act to dive. The flat stone was warm to his feet fromyesterday's sun, and through the mist of a September morning there waspromise of more heat, but now the grey curtain hung in a stillness thatwas broken by his plunge. He came to the surface, shaking his blackhead, and, when he had paddled round the pool, he landed, glisteninglike the dewy fields beyond him. Slowly he drew on his clothes, leavingthe quiet of the wood unruffled, but his eyes were alert. If there wereany movement among the birches, with their air of trees seen mirrored ina lake, he did not miss it. He, too, was of the woods and the water,sharing their life and taking mood and colour from them. He sat verystill when he had dressed, with lean hands resting on his raised knees,and eyes that marked how the water in the pool was sinking for lack ofrain and how the stream that fed it had become a trickle. In a wetseason his flat stone was three feet under water, and there was arushing river above and below his bathing-place, tearing headlong fromthose hills which, last night, had been hidden in heavy cloud and mightbe wrapped in it still for all the low mist would let him know. He sawhow the bracken was dried before its time, and the trees were ready tolet fall their leaves at the first autumn wind, and how some of them,not to be baulked of their last grandeur, had tried to flame into goldthat their death might not be green. There were blackberries within ayard of him but he did not move to get them for the mist was like a handlaid on him; but when at length it stirred a little, thrust aside by aray of sun, he rose, whistling softly, to take the fruit, and then,barefooted and bareheaded, he walked home across the fields.
The sun came out more boldly and Alexander broke into louder, gayerwhistling, welcoming the sunshine and warning his mother that it wasbreakfast-time. From the back of the low, white house he heard heranswering note, and thus assured that the bacon was in the pan, or nearit, he took a seat on the old horse-block and waited.
Behind him was the house-front and the strip of low-walled garden, wherelad's love, and pinks, and tobacco-plant grew as they chose among thestraggling rose-bushes; before him were the fields he had crossed, thetrees bordering the stream, and, topping the mist, the broad breast ofthe Blue Hill. On his left hand the rough road before the house dwindledto a track that led upwards to the pass between the sloping shoulder ofthe Blue Hill and the jagged, precipitous rocks of the Spiked Crags, andbetween these and the hill behind the house a deeply cut watercourse wasgrooved, hardly more than an empty trough at this moment, but in thetime of rain lashed by a flood of waters that looked from the house likea white and solid streak. Alexander called this water themountain-witch's hair, for it streamed to his fancy like the locks of anold hag, and when the sound of its roaring came to him through thewinter night he thought she was shrieking in anger, and he pulled thebed-clothes about his ears. But he told no one of that secret name, and,like other people, he spoke of it as the Steep Water, because of thecascades in which it fell. Broad Beck was the name of the stream inwhich he bathed, and, but for the one deep pool, it went over stonyshallows to the lake of which Alexander, sitting on the horse-block,could see a glimmer at his right hand, like a grey pathway between theinn roof and the trees in the little churchyard. It was a great sheet ofwater edged on the hither shore by the high-road and the rough moorlandbeyond, on the other by a black moun