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Updated: May 13, 2025
In a while everything was tidy and ship-shape, and when he had made a fire, and had constructed a tripod of branches from which to hang the quart pot, newly filled with water from the sparkling runnel near at hand, the lonely man sat down and smoked again, letting his eyes rove here and there, and seeming to scan the scene before him with a dreamy interest.
Just before him a runnel of water is gliding, and he bends his head to drink. You may hear the water as it gurgles down his capacious throat. He raises his head, and the drops trickle from his wet beard. He stands with an air of stupid abstraction, unconscious of the lurking danger. Noiselessly the hunter cocks his rifle.
A bubbling runnel by the side of one of those modern Appian or Flaminian highways is but like a kennel; the little hill is diminished to a hillock the romantic hillock to a molehill, almost too small for sight.
Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend.
When we had traced one of the tracks to the road, we concluded it was Missy's, and returned to the other. But we had not followed it very far before we came upon the poor mare lying upon her back in a deep runnel, in which the snow was very soft. She had put her forefeet in it as she galloped heedlessly along, and tumbled right over.
The runnel, like the greater stream below, had many voices. It chattered light-hearted trifles, lamented child-like griefs, and sobbed itself to sleep over and over and over. In the black cañon the river bellowed its rage and triumph and despair. The shadows of the night were deep, and silence brooded within them, and the ears thrilled and tingled to the monitions of its voiceless sea.
Below lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. This quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings.
Here, however, the aforesaid Mary Runnel comes into play. The other spirits have told us that the veracity of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every mistake or falsehood.
For the 'shoot, as we called our little runnel of everlasting water, never known to freeze before, and always ready for any man either to wash his hands, or drink, where it spouted from a trough of bark, set among white flint-stones; this at last had given in, and its music ceased to lull us, as we lay in bed.
Now it was scarcely wider than a brook might be, and was nearly over-arched by its alders and willows; now it widened out and sped in many a flashing runnel through a broad jungle of reeds where the blistering rays of the sun beat down with tropical ardour; then it slept in pools full of long green streamers that waved slowly like an Undine's hair.
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