otpath. Then it led me to the old bridge over the
stream, and thus I came to Wrellisford, and found after travelling
in many lands a village with no wheel tracks in its street. On the
other side of the bridge, my friend the road struggled a few yards
up a grassy slope, and there ceased. Over all the village hung a
great stillness, with the roar of the Wrellis cutting right across
it, and there came occasionally the bark of a dog that kept watch
over the broken stillness and over the sanctity of that untravelled
road. That terrible and wasting fever that, unlike so many plagues,
comes not from the East but from the West, the fever of hurry, had
not come here--only the Wrellis hurried on his eternal quest, but it
was a calm and placid hurry that gave one time for song. It was in
the early afternoon, and nobody was about. Either they worked beyond
the mysterious valley that nursed Wrellisford and hid it from the
world, or else they secluded themselves within their old-time houses
that were roofed with tiles of stone. I sat down upon the old stone
bridge and watched the Wrellis, who seemed to me to be the only
traveller that came from far away into this village where roads end,
and passed on beyond it. And yet the Wrellis comes singing out of
eternity, and tarries for a very little while in the village where
roads end, and passes on into eternity again; and so surely do all
that dwell in Wrellisford. I wondered as I leaned upon the bridge in
what place the Wrellis would first find the sea, whether as he
wound idly through meadows on his long quest he would suddenly
behold him, and, leaping down over some rocky cliff, take to him at
once the message of the hills. Or whether, widening slowly into some
grand and tidal estuary, he would take his waste of waters to
the sea and the might of the river should meet with the might of the
waves, like to two Emperors clad in gleaming mail meeting midway
between two hosts of war; and the little Wrellis would become a
haven for returning ships and a setting-out place for adventurous
men.

A little beyond the bridge there stood an old mill with a ruined
roof, and a small branch of the Wrellis rushed through its emptiness
shouting, like a boy playing alone in a corridor of some desolate
house. The mill-wheel was gone, but there lay there still great bars
and wheels and cogs, the bones of some dead industry. I know not
what industry was once lord in that house, I know not what