Fairburn Chase lack water to complete its beauty. In front of the Hall itself moved a broad slow stream, which presently slid rather than fell down ledges of mossy stone into a wilderness of trees and shrubs, through which it wandered on like one who has lost his way, but singing blithely nevertheless. Another stream, which was my favourite, burst spring-like from the very heart of the Chase, having been artificially conveyed beneath the avenue, and ran quite a little river, and at a great rate, to form the island where the herons lived; after which, as though it had done its work, it went its way tranquilly enough: If it had nothing to boast of but the heronry it might have been a proud little brook, for never did colony of those solemn birds take their sad pleasure in a more lovely spot; but besides it had a certain bend in it—essential to the beauty of a brook as straightness is to that of a tree—which I have never seen rivalled elsewhere. Its right bank rose there, though not abruptly, and left half its bed of brown sand and loose tinkling shingle bare to the sunlight, save so much of it as the shade of a cluster of lime trees could cover. Here the bee and the bird brought their songs, and the dragon-flies the glory of their turquoise armour and glittering wings throughout the summer noons. The cool fragrant smell of the limes, and the drowsy music of the insects that haunted them, were inexpressibly pleasant to me, who, I am afraid, had not a little of the Asiatic indolence in my nature. Sometimes a group of swans sailed by on the unruffled stream, themselves a slumbrous pageant fit enough to herald sleep; but at all events, swans or no swans, I often did sleep there. One July afternoon, in particular, when the heat was almost as intense as at Calcutta, and no punkahs to cool one, I went to this place with malice prepense to lie there and do nothing, which, from my youth up, has always been synonymous with a siesta. I cannot do absolutely nothing, and yet keep awake. I very much admire the people whom I often meet in railway carriages, who endure, without books or newspapers, hundreds of miles of weary travel, and who do it with their eyes open. I wonder they do not break out into a melody, or at least a whistle. They cannot possibly be thinking all that time, and indeed they have no appearance of employing themselves in that way, but "stare right on with calm eternal eyes," with no more speculation in them than those of the sphinx herself. I envy, but I cannot imitate those happy persons. There is no such state of coma with me; I either wake or sleep.

I lay, then, beneath the limes by the brook in Fairburn Chase, half-buried in the soft brown sand; and even while I looked upon the glancing stream, with the grand old willow opposite, that bent its hoary honours half-way o'er, the scene dissolved and changed; the brook became a river, and the willow a palm-tree, and the Chase a sandy tract, and the fir-clump on the distant hill the snow-capped Himalaya. I saw, too—and, alas! I was never more to see them, except, as then, in dreams—my father and my mother; but they passed by me with pitiful, loving looks, and went their way. Then the ayah, the black nurse who was watching over me—for I was once more a child—stole down to the river-brink, and drew a fluted dagger from her bosom, and dipped it in the sacred flood, and I felt that I was to die. I knew her well; we two had loved one another as nurse and child do love, where the nurse perforce takes half the mother's part; as the child grows up, his affection, at the best, congeals to gratitude; but not so with the breast that suckled him—God forgive us men; and the pain of my dream was sharpest because it was my own dear ayah who was about to slay me. I had offended Vishnu, or else she would not have done it; her gods demanded my life of her; but she was sorry; I felt her cold lips upon my brow, and then a large round tear fell upon my cheek like icy hail, and I awoke. There was a tumult of sounds in the air; the birds, and the bees, and the bubbling wave, silent while I had slept, seemed to have burst out together in chorus at my waking. I was bewildered, and knew not where I was. My dream was more distinct at first than the realities about me. If I had but closed my eyes again, I knew that it would be continued at the spot where it had left off, that the fluted dagger would have drunk my life-blood; and therefore I made an effort to rouse myself. Wondrous are dreams, and wondrous the borderland 'twixt life and sleep! If my existence had depended upon it, I could not, for some seconds, have told for certain whether I was in England or in India. Then reason began to reassume her sway, and the vague mysterious powers, of whom we shall one day perhaps have a more certain knowledge, withdrew reluctant from their usurped dominion over me. I remembered, however, most distinctly every incident that they had brought about, and I placed my hand mechanically upon my left cheek—I had been lying upon my right—upon which the tear had seemed to fall. Great Heaven, it was still wet! I was really startled. The cloudless sky forbade the idea of a drop of rain having fallen; I had shed no tear myself while dreaming, for my eyes were dry, and even if I had, it could scarcely have dropped as it did, making a cool round spot in the centre of the cheek—it would have slid down and left a little frigid line: there were no stones for the stream to splash against and thus besprinkle me.

It was very odd. Still, I did not imagine for a moment that my poor black nurse had really come across the seas to drop the tributary tear upon her sleeping boy; moreover, she could scarcely have got away so suddenly without leaving some trace of her departure, some...—My heart all of a sudden ceased to beat; a shiver ran through me, as runs from stem to stern through a doomed ship that comes end on at speed upon a sunken rock; my eyes had fallen—while I thus reasoned with myself—upon a sight to terrify an older man than I, after such a dream; the print of a woman's bare feet in the sand. Had there been any footprints—those of a keeper or watcher, for instance—I should have been startled to know that some one had passed by while I slumbered, for most certainly the sand had been untrodden up to the moment I had lost consciousness; but that a woman with naked feet had been really present while I dreamed that horrible dream, was something more than startling. In Scotland such a circumstance would have been less remarkable, but in Fairburn I had not yet seen any person without shoes. There were a considerable number of footprints, but only of one individual: she had stood beside me for some time, for they were deeper close to the place where I had lain, and there was also one impression there which looked as though the mysterious visitor had knelt. They had come and returned the same way, which was not the one that I had come myself, and they began and ended at the stream-side a few yards beyond, and out of sight of the bend which was my favourite haunt. The woman had doubtless crossed and recrossed by means of some natural stepping-stones that showed their heads above water; there was no path on the other side, but only a tangled thicket, through which it would have been impossible to track her, even had I been so disposed, which I was not. To say truth, I was terribly discomposed. For a minute or two I clung to the notion that the footprints were my own, made, perhaps, under the influence of somnambulism. I took off my shoes, and measured the tracks with my own feet, but I found, boy as I was, that mine effaced them. They were certainly the marks of a woman; smaller than those of a grown male, yet firmer set than those of a child. Never since the days of Robinson Crusoe was ever man so panic-struck by footprints in the sand as I. Although it was broad daylight, and the air was alive with sounds, I fairly trembled. The many evil stories which, during my short stay at Fairburn, I had already heard of the old Hall, a corner of which I could discern from where I stood,