be a vain hope that I nourish, but I think that God has put it into my
heart to write this book, and I hope that he will allow me to
persevere. And yet indeed I know that I am not fit for so holy a task,
but perhaps he will give me fitness, and cleanse my tongue with a coal
from his altar fire.

I

The Red Spring

Very deep in this enchanted land of green hills in which I live, lies a
still and quiet valley. No road runs along it; but a stream with many
curves and loops, deep-set in hazels and alders, moves brimming down.
There is no house to be seen; nothing but pastures and little woods
which clothe the hill-sides on either hand. In one of these fields,
not far from the stream, lies a secluded spot that I visit duly from
time to time. It is hard enough to find the place; and I have
sometimes directed strangers to it, who have returned without
discovering it. Some twenty yards away from the stream, with a ring of
low alders growing round it, there is a pool; not like any other pool I
know. The basin in which it lies is roughly circular, some ten feet
across. I suppose it is four or five feet deep. From the centre of
the pool rises an even gush of very pure water, with a certain hue of
green, like a faintly-tinted gem. The water in its flow makes a
perpetual dimpling on the surface; I have never known it to fail even
in the longest droughts; and in sharp frosty days there hangs a little
smoke above it, for the water is of a noticeable warmth.

This spring is strongly impregnated with iron, so strongly that it has
a sharp and medical taste; from what secret bed of metal it comes I do
not know, but it must be a bed of great extent, for, though the spring
runs thus, day by day and year by year, feeding its waters with the
bitter mineral over which it passes, it never loses its tinge; and the
oldest tradition of the place is that it was even so centuries ago.

All the rest of the pool is full of strange billowy cloudlike growths,
like cotton-wool or clotted honey, all reddened with the iron of the
spring; for it rusts on thus coming to the air. But the orifice you
can always see, and that is of a dark blueness; out of which the pure
green water rises among the vaporous and filmy folds, runs away briskly
out of the pool in a little channel among alders, all stained with the
same orange tints, and falls into the greater stream at a loop, tinging
its waters for a mile.

It is said to have strange health-