He fell to thinking of other bright pools in the River Ar, where he had used to swim; and of Ten Alders village under the great slanting forests of the mountain; of the shadows of morning across the dusty village street, the fire leaping under bellows-blast in the smith’s smelting-pit on a winter afternoon, the witch’s dark fragrant hut where the air was heavy with smoke and wreathing spells. He had not thought of these things for a long time. Now they came back to him, on the night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind’s reach and made
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