r. We found an old, slow, bovine man, with a cheerful face, who
readily threw aside some fumbling work he was doing, and guided us; and
we should never have found the spot without him. He led us to a
stream, crossed by a single plank with a handrail, on which some
children had put a trap, baited with nuts for the poor squirrels, that
love to run chattering across the rail from wood to wood. Then we
entered a little covert; it was very pleasant in there, all dark and
green and still; and here all at once we came to the place; in the
covert were half a dozen little steep pits, each a few yards across,
dug out of the chalk. From each of the pits, which lay side by side, a
channel ran down to the stream, and in each channel flowed a small
bickering rivulet of infinite clearness. The pits themselves were a
few feet deep; at the bottom of each was a shallow pool, choked with
leaves; and here lay the rare beauty of the place. The water rose in
each pit out of secret ways, but in no place that we could see. The
first pit was still when we looked upon it; then suddenly the water
rose in a tiny eddy, in one corner, among the leaves, sending a little
ripple glancing across the pool. It was as though something, branch or
insect, had fallen from above, the water leapt so suddenly. Then it
rose again in another place, then in another; then five or six little
freshets rose all at once, the rings crossing and recrossing. And it
was the same in all the pits, which we visited one by one; we descended
and drank, and found the water as cold as ice, and not less pure; while
the old man babbled on about the waste of so much fine water, and of
its virtues for weak eyes: "Ain't it cold, now? Ain't it, then? My
God, ain't it?"--he was a man with a rich store of simple
asseverations,--"And ain't it good for weak eyes neither! You must
just come to the place the first thing in the morning, and wash your
eyes in the water, and ain't it strengthening then!" So he chirped on,
saying everything over and over, like a bird among the thickets.

We paid him for his trouble, with a coin that made him so gratefully
bewildered that he said to us: "Now, gentlemen, if there's anything
else that you want, give it a name; and if you meet any one as you go
away, say 'Perrett told me' (Perrett's my name), and then you'll see!"
What the precise virtue of this invocation was, we did not have an
opportunity of testing, but that it was a talisman to unlo