well-being.

Then came a more serious difficulty: the milk must be mixed with
water, and water as cold as Clare's legs would kill the drug-dazed
shred of humanity! What was to be done? It would be equally dangerous
to give her the strong milk of a cow undiluted. There was but one way:
he must feed her as do the pigeons. First, however, he must have
water! The well was almost inaccessible: to get to it and return would
fearfully waste life-precious time! The rain-water in the little pool
must serve the necessity! It was preferable to that in the but!

Until many years after, it did not occur to Clare as strange that
there should be even a drop of water in that water-but. Whence was it
fed? There was no roof near, from which the rain might run into it. If
there had ever been a pipe to supply it, surely, in a house so long
forsaken, its continuity must have given way One always sees such
barrels empty, dry, and cracked: this one was apparently known to be
full of water, for what woman in her senses, however inferior those
senses, would throw her child into an empty but! How did it happen to
be full? Clare was almost driven to the conclusion that it had been
filled for the evil purpose to which it was that night put. Against
this was the fact that it would not have been easy to fill such a huge
vessel by hand. I suggested that the blacksmith and his predecessors
might have used it for the purposes of the forge, and kept it and its
feeder in repair. Mr. Skymer endeavoured repeatedly to find out what
had become of the blacksmith, but never with any approach to success;
the probability being that he had left the world long before his
natural time, by disease engendered or quarrel occasioned through his
drunkenness.