“No quicksand in our little river, miss. But your father's daughter shannot go into the muck, while John Withypool stands by. I see un now, sure enough; now I see un! But her needeth care, or her may all goo away in mullock. Well, I thought my eyes was sharp enough; but I'm blest if I should have spied that, though. A bit of flint, mebbe, or of blue glass bottle. Anyhow, us will see the bottom of un.” He was wasting no time while he spoke, but working steadfastly for his purpose, fixing the blade of his shovel below the little blue line I was peering at, so that no slip of the soft yellow slush should bury it down, and plunge over it. If that had once happened, good-by to all chance of ever beholding this thing again, for the river was coming, with fury and foam, to assert its ancient right of way. With a short laugh the miller jumped down into the pit. “Me to be served so, by my own mill-stream! Lor', if I don't pay you out for this!” His righteous wrath failed to stop the water from pouring into the pit behind him; and, strong as he was, he nearly lost his footing, having only mud to stand upon. It seemed to me that he was going to be drowned, and I offered him the handle of my spud to help him; but he stopped where he was, and was not going to be hurried. “I got un now,” he said; “now I don't mind coming out. You see if I don't pay you out for this! Why, I always took you for a reasonable hanimal.” He shook his fist strongly at the river, which had him well up to the middle by this time; and then he disdainfully waded out, with wrath in all his countenance. “I've a great mind to stop there, and see what her would do,” he said to me, forgetting altogether what he went for. “And I would, if I had had my dinner. A scat of a thing as I can manage with my thumb! Ah, you have made a bad day of it.” “But what have you found, Mr. Withypool?” I asked, for I could not enter into his wrath against the water, wet as he was to the shoulders. “You have something in your hand. May I see it, if you please? And then do please to go home and change your clothes.” “A thing I never did in my life, miss, and should be ashamed to begin at this age. Clothes gets wet, and clothes dries on us, same as un did on the sheep afore us; else they gets stiff and creasy. What this little thing is ne'er a body may tell, in my line of life--but look'th aristocratic.” The “mullock,” as he called it, from his hands, and from the bed where it had lain so long, so crusted the little thing which he gave me, that I dipped it again in the swelling stream, and rubbed it with both hands, to make out what it was. And then I thought how long it had lain there; and suddenly to my memory it came, that in all likelihood the time of that was nineteen years this very day. “Will another year pass,” I cried, “before I make out all about it? What are you, and who, now looking at me with such sad, sad eyes?”