to have no bottom at all. There was a belief current among them that
once, before they were born, a man had been drowned there, and his
body never found.

They would stand on the shore and look with horror, which yet gave
somehow a pleasant titillation to their youthful spirits, at this
water which bore such an evil name. Their elders did not need to
caution them; even the most venturesome had an awe of the Dead Hole,
and would not meddle with it unduly.

Jerome climbed over the stone wall. The land on the other side
belonged to Doctor Prescott. He went through the grove of pine-trees
and reached the pond--the end called the Dead Hole. He stood there
looking and listening. It was a small sheet of water; the other
shore, swampy and skirted with white-flowering bushes and young
trees, looked very near; a cloying, honey sweetness came across, and
a silvery smoke of mist was beginning to curl up from it. The frogs
were clamorous, and every now and then came the bass boom of a
bull-frog. A red light from the westward sun came through the thin
growth opposite, and lay over the pond and the shore. Little swarms
of gnats danced in it.

A swarm of the little gauzy things, so slight and ephemeral that they
seemed rather a symbolism of life than life itself, whirled before
the boy's wild, tearful eyes, and he moved aside and looked down, and
then cried out and snatched something from the ground at his feet. It
was the hat Abel Edwards had worn when he left home that morning.
Jerome stood holding his father's hat, gazing at it with a look in
his face like an old man's. Indeed, it may have been that a sudden
old age of the spirit came in that instant over the boy. He had not