sleep, for sure; probably very much longer than I dare guess. That's a
problem I've got to go to work on, before many days!"

But now for the present he dismissed it again; he pushed it aside in
the press of urgent matters. And, parting the undergrowth, he broke
his crackling way through the deep wood.

He had gone but a few hundred yards when an exclamation of surprised
delight burst from his lips.

"Water! Water!" he cried. "What? A spring, so close? A pool, right
here at hand? Good luck, by Jove, the very first thing!"

And, stopping where he stood, he gazed at it with keen, unalloyed
pleasure.

There, so near to the massive bulk of the tower that the vast shadow
lay broadly across it, Stern had suddenly come upon as beautiful a
little watercourse as ever bubbled forth under the yews of Arden or
lapped the willows of Hesperides.

He beheld a roughly circular depression in the woods, fern-banked and
fringed with purple blooms; at the bottom sparkled a spring,
leaf-bowered, cool, Elysian.

From this, down through a channel which the water must have worn for
itself by slow erosion, a small brook trickled, widening out into a
pool some fifteen feet across; whence, brimming over, it purled away
through the young sweet-flags and rushes with tempting little woodland
notes.