leaving the stretches of sand and of shingle visible, but it was
still deep in many parts.

She stripped herself and went down into it, and washed the blood
which had by this time caked upon her flesh. It seemed a pity, she
thought, to sully with that dusky stain this pure, bright, shining
stream; but she had no other way to rid herself of it, and she had in
all the world no other clothes than these poor woollen rags.

Her heart was still sore for the fate of the conquered ram; and her
eyes filled again with tears as she washed his blood off her in the
gay running current. But the water was soothing and fresh, the sun
shone on its bright surface; the comfrey and fig-wart blew in the
breeze, the heather smell filled the atmosphere.

She was only a child, and her spirits rose, and she capered about in
the shallows, and flung the water over her head, and danced to her
own reflection in it, and forgot her sorrow. Then she washed her
petticoats as well as she could, having nothing but water alone, and
all the while she was as naked as a Naiad, and the sun smiled on her
brown, thin, childish body as it smiled on a stem of plaintain or on
the plumage of a coot.

Then when she had washed her skirt she spread it out on the sand to
dry, and sat down beside it, for the heat to bake her limbs after her
long bath. There was no one, and there was nothing, in sight; if any
came near she could hide under the great dock leaves until such
should have passed. It was high noon, and the skirt of wool and the
skirt of hemp grew hot and steamed under the vertical rays; she was
soon as dry as the shingles from which the water had receded for