Ballad of Young Benjie.
We—that is, the four members of our Oxford reading party—were bathing in a deep pool in many-terraced Tees, and I was seated on a rock's edge, drying in the September sunshine, and quoting from Clough's 'Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich':
'How to the element offering their bodies, down shooting the fall,
They mingled themselves with the flood and the force of imperious water,'
when from the central black cauldron immediately below me appeared the face of Sandie—our best diver—with a most curiously perturbed expression on his countenance. I had been watching a little circlet of foam that eddied round on the outskirts of the current, and seemed to wink at me with a hint of hidden and evasive mystery.
Then it vanished, for Sandie's head had shattered it.
'Hello, Sandie!' I cried to him, 'what's up? It's not cramp, is it?'
He climbed out and up to where I sat on the rock above, and shook the water from his hair.
'Ugh!' he said in disgust. 'I've just been to the bottom, and there I swear I came across a drowned body; I felt a corpse and touched long hair. I believe it was a woman's.' He looked at his hands in disgust, and perceptibly shivered.
'Nonsense!' said I. 'It must have been a drowned cow or sheep, or possibly a pony.'
'Go down and look, or rather feel for yourself,' he retorted.