dried up, and was said to have deep holes in
it. The boys told darkly braggart stories about this pond. They had
stood on this rock and that rock with poles of fabulous length; they
had probed the still water of the pond, and "never once hit the
bottom, sir." They had flung stones with all their might, and,
listening sharply forward like foxes, had not heard them "strike
bottom, sir."

One end of this pond, reaching up well among the pine-trees, had the
worst repute, and was called indeed a darkly significant name--the
"Dead Hole." It was confidently believed by all the village children
to have no bottom at all. There was a belief current among them that
once, before they were born, a man had been drowned there, and his
body never found.

They would stand on the shore and look with horror, which yet gave
somehow a pleasant titillation to their youthful spirits, at this
water which bore such an evil name. Their elders did not need to
caution them; even the most venturesome had an awe of the Dead Hole,
and would not meddle with it unduly.

Jerome climbed over the stone wall. The land on the other side
belonged to Doctor Prescott. He went through the grove of pine-trees
and reached the pond--the end called the Dead Hole. He stood there
looking and listening. It was a small sheet of water; the other
shore, swampy and skirted with white-flowering bushes and young
trees, looked very near; a cloying, honey sweetness came across, and
a silvery smoke of mist was beginning to curl up from it. The frogs
were clamorous, and every now and then came the bass boom of a
bull-frog. A red light from the westward sun came through the thin
growth opposite, and lay over the pond and the shore. Little swarms
of gnats danced in it.

A swarm of the little gauzy things, so slight and ephemeral that they
seemed rather a symbolism of life than life itself, whirled before
the boy's wild, tearful eyes, and he moved aside and looked down, and
then cried out and snatched something from the ground at his feet. It
was the hat Abel Edwards had worn when he left home that morning.
Jerome stood holding his father's hat, gazing at it with a look in
his face like an old man's. Indeed, it may have been that a sudden
old age of the spirit came in that instant over the boy. He had not
before conceived of anything but an accident happening to his father;
now all at once he saw plainly that if his father, Abel Edwards, had
come to his death in the pond i