and topples again like a wave.

I had drawn two shining peel out of the pool, and sat eating my lunch
on the edge of the Leap, with my back to the road. Forty feet
beneath me the water lay black and glossy, behind the dotted foliage
of a birch-tree. My rod stuck upright from the turf at my elbow,
and, whenever I turned my head, neatly bisected the countenance and
upper half of Seth Truscott, an indigenous gentleman of miscellaneous
habits and a predatory past, who had followed me that morning to
carry the landing-net.

It was he who, after lunch, imparted the story of the rock on which
we sat; and as it seemed at the time to gain somewhat by the telling,
I will not risk defacing it by meddling with his dialect.


"I reckon, sir," he began, with an upward nod at a belt of larches,
the fringe of a great estate, that closed the view at the head of the
vale, "you'm too young to mind th' ould Earl o' Bellarmine, that
owned Castle Cannick, up yonder, in my growin' days. 'Ould Wounds'
he was nick-named--a cribbage-faced, what-the-blazes kind o' varmint,
wi' a gossan wig an' a tongue like oil o' vitriol. He'd a-led the
fore-half o' his life, I b'lieve, in London church-town, by reason
that he an' his father couldn' be left in a room together wi'out
comin' to fisticuffs: an' by all accounts was fashion's favourite in
the naughty city, doin' his duty in that state o' life an' playing
Hamlet's ghost among the Ten Commandments.

"The upshot was that he killed a young gentleman over a game o'
whist, an' that was too much even for the Londoners. So he packed up