a man that sang and sometimes it was a
woman, and sometimes the one who sang it did it so well that two or
three of the people who were there fell to the ground shrieking and
tearing with their hands. The singing went on, and the people in the
ring kept swaying to and fro for a long time, and at last the moon would
rise over a place they called the Tole Deol, and came up and showed them
swinging and swaying from side to side, with the sweet thick smoke
curling up from the burning coals, and floating in circles all around
them. Then they had their supper. A boy and a girl brought it to them;
the boy carried a great cup of wine, and the girl carried a cake of
bread, and they passed the bread and the wine round and round, but they
tasted quite different from common bread and common wine, and changed
everybody that tasted them. Then they all rose up and danced, and secret
things were brought out of some hiding place, and they played
extraordinary games, and danced round and round and round in the
moonlight, and sometimes people would suddenly disappear and never be
heard of afterwards, and nobody knew what had happened to them. And
they drank more of that curious wine, and they made images and
worshipped them, and nurse showed me how the images were made one day
when we were out for a walk, and we passed by a place where there was a
lot of wet clay. So nurse asked me if I would like to know what those
things were like that they made on the hill, and I said yes. Then she
asked me if I would promise never to tell a living soul a word about it,
and if I did I was to be thrown into the black pit with the dead people,
and I said I wouldn't tell anybody, and she said the same thing again
and again, and I promised. So she took my wooden spade and dug a big
lump of clay and put it in my tin bucket, and told me to say if any one
met us that I was going to make pies when I went home. Then we went on a
little way till we came to a little brake growing right down into the
road, and nurse stopped, and looked up the road and down it, and then
peeped through the hedge into the field on the other side, and then she
said, 'Quick!' and we ran into the brake, and crept in and out among the
bushes till we had gone a good way from the road. Then we sat down under
a bush, and I wanted so much to know what nurse was going to make with
the clay, but before she would begin she made me promise again not to
say a word about it, and she went again and p