the neighborhood and my feelings was the
air that came to my lips, I laughed aloud. At the sudden sound of my
voice I felt both startled and somewhat abashed. Laughter here was
clearly out of place; and besides, the echo that followed was
obtrusively and unpleasantly distinct, appearing to come both from a
deep-arched doorway in the wall near by, and from the vaulted hollow of
the basin of the fount, which lay just beneath the dog's jaws. As I
should have said before, the fountain was a great cube of darkish stone,
along the top of which a stone dog crouched; and the water gushed from
between its carved fore-paws into a deep basin, the side of which was
cleft two thirds of the way to its base. Through this break, which I saw
to be an old one from the layers of green film lining it, the stream
bubbled out and ran off among barren heaps of debris, to sink itself in
the weeds of some stagnant pool. The head of the dog was thrust forward
and rested upon the fore-paws as if the brute were sleeping; but its
half-open eyes seemed to watch the approaches to the doorway in the
wall. As a piece of sculpture, the animal was simply marvellous. In its
gathered limbs, though relaxed and perfectly at rest, a capacity for
swift and terrible action seemed to hold itself in reserve, and a breath
almost appeared to come from the half-opened jaws, momentarily dimming
the crystal that smoothly gushed beneath. No scrap of vegetation could
the rill persuade out of the inexorable sterility around, saving for
some curdled greenish mosses that waved slowly from the sides of the
basin, or pointed from root-hold on brick and shard, where the small
current loitered a little. I am not a taker of notes, nor, for all my
vagrant and exploring tendencies, am I a very close observer.
Nevertheless, though it is now a year and a half since what I am telling
of took place, the minutest details of that strange fountain, and of the
scene about it, are as definitely before me as if I had been there but
yesterday. I am not going to inflict them all upon my reader, yet would
do so without a spark of compunction, if by such means I could dim the
all too vivid remembrance. The experiences that befell me by this
fountain have shaken painfully the confidence I once enjoyed as to the
fulness of my knowledge of the powers of things material. I cannot say
that I have become credulous; but I have ceased to regard as necessarily
absurd whatever I find it difficult to expla