low
flow of the fog--as the water in a slow flowing stream will come to rest
when it strikes the stems of a willow submerged at its margin. I was
trying even at the time to decide how much of what I seemed to divine
rather than to perceive was imagination and how much reality. And I was
just about ready to contend that I also saw to the north something like
the faintest possible suggestion of an eddy, such as would form in the
flowing water below a pillar or a rock--when I was rudely shaken up and
jolted.

Trap, trap, I heard the horses' feet on the culvert. Crash! And Peter
went stumbling down. Then a violent lurch of the buggy, I holding
on--Peter rallied, and then, before I had time to get a firmer grasp
on the lines, both horses bolted again. It took me some time to realize
what had happened. It was the culvert, of course; it had broken down,
and lucky I was that the ditch underneath was shallow. Only much later,
when reflecting upon the incident, did I see that this accident was
really the best verification of what I was nearly inclined to regard as
the product of my imagination. The trees must indeed have stood where I
had seemed to see that quiet reach in the fog and that eddy...

We tore along. I spoke to the horses and quietly and evenly pulled at
the lines. I think it must have been several minutes before I had
them under control again. And then--in this night of weird things--the
weirdest sight of them all showed ahead.

I was just beginning to wonder, whether after all we had not lost the
road again, when the faintest of all faint glimmers began to define
itself somewhere in front. And... was I right? Yes, a small, thin voice
came out of the fog that incessantly floated into my cone of light and
was left behind in eddies. What did it mean?...

The glimmer was now defining itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very
far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent
luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses
turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to
the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and both beasts
snorted and stopped.

In a flash a thought came. I had just broken through a culvert--the
bridge, too, must have broken down, and somebody had put a light there
to warn the chance traveller who might stray along on a night like this!
I was on the point of getting out of my wraps, when a thinner wave in
the mist permi