JASPER ST. AUBYN. 309 



"At the upper end this pool is so deep as to be vulgarly- 

 deemed unfathomable; below, however, it expands yet wider 

 into a shallow rippling ford, where it is crossed by the high- 

 road, down stream of which again there is another long, sharp 

 rapid, and another fall, over the last steps of the hills; after 

 which the nature of the stream becomes changed, and it 

 murmurs gently onward through a green pastoral country, 

 unrippled and uninterrupted. 



" Just in the inner angle of the high-road, on the right hand 

 of the stream, there stood an old-fashioned, low-browed, thatch- 

 covered, stone cottage, with a rude portico of rustic woodwork 

 overrun with jasmine and virgin-bower, and a pretty flower- 

 garden sloping down in successive terraces to the edge of the 

 basin. Beside this, there was no other house in sight, unless it 

 were part of the roof of a mill which stood in the low ground 

 on the brink of the second fall, surrounded with a mass of 

 willows. But the tall steeple of a country church, raising itself 

 heavenward above the brow of the hill, seemed to show that, 

 although concealed by the undulations of the ground, a village 

 was. hard at hand. 



" The morning had changed a second time, a hazy film had 

 crept up to the zenith, and the sun was now covered with a pale 

 golden veil, and a slight current of air down the gorge ruffled 

 the water. 



" It was a capital pool, famous for being the temporary haunt 

 of the very finest fish, which were wont to lie there awhile, as if 

 to recruit themselves after the exertions of leaping the two falls 

 and stemming the double rapid, before attempting to ascend the 

 stream farther. 



