I CALL it stupid to talk about there being water-spirits in a pond,” said Joe.
“Well, I don’t know that I agree with you,” said Uncle John. “Of course that isn’t the way we explain things nowadays; but if you had lived in those times, I daresay you would have thought as other people thought.”
“But it wasn’t spirits that made the water run out, was it?” Joe asked.
“No, I don’t think it was,” said Uncle John. “What I should like to know is—can any of you think what did make the water run out?”
“Did the sun dry it up?” asked Dick.
“Perhaps there was a spring and it stopped running,” said David.
“I don’t fancy you have guessed right, either of you,” said Uncle John. “That pond of theirs was a dew-pond filled by dew—filled from the clouds; and it went dry not because there wasn’t plenty of dew in the air to keep it filled up, but because the pond leaked, and the water ran out faster than it could come in.”
“So I suppose when they made the new one with fresh clay, it was watertight and didn’t leak,” said Dick. “But I don’t understand now how the dew could fill it up.”