"I have not won it yet," Sir Galahad answered, sighing. "Yet, poor
comrade, I may do something for thee, though I cannot stay thy
dancing."

So he stretched out his hand and touched Sir Dinar: and by his touch
Sir Dinar became a withered leaf of the wood. And when mothers and
nurses see him dancing before the wind, they tell this story of him
to their children.



II.--"FLOWING SOURCE."


Master Simon's inn, the "Flowing Source"--"Good Entertainment for Man
and Beast"--leant over the riverside by the ferry, a mile and a half
above Ponteglos town. The fresh water of Cuckoo River met the salt
Channel tide right under its windows, by the wooden ladder where
Master Simon chained his ferry-boat. Fourteen miles inland, a brown
trout-stream singing down from the moors, plunged over a ledge of
rock into the cool depths of Cuckoo Valley. Thenceforward it ran by
beds of sundew, water-mint and asphodel, under woods so steeply
converging that the traveller upon the ridges heard it as the trickle
of water in a cavern. But just above Master Simon's inn the valley
widened out into arable and grey pasture land, and the river, too,
widened and grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage at
the spring tides. In summer, from the bow-window of his coffee-room,
Master Simon could follow its course down through the meadows to the
church-tower of Ponteglos and the shipping congregated there about
the wharves, and watch in the middle distance the sails of a barge or