Near the doorway he caught sight of a staple of rusty iron let into the wall; a little above this, a second of the same kind; and at the same interval above the second, a third. Looking up the wall, he perceived that similar staples projected from the stonework as far up as the flickering light of his candle revealed. Their shape, and the intervals between them, indicated that they were steps by which the wall could be climbed. And then it flashed upon him suddenly that he was in an ancient well, known as St. Cuby’s Well, though who St. Cuby was nobody knew except, perhaps, Mr. Carlyon, deeply learned in the antiquities of his county. The upper end of the well-shaft opened on the cliff, about a quarter-mile from the cottage of old Joe Penwarden, the exciseman. It was covered by the ivy-grown ruins of a small oratory, whither in times long past the faithful had come to have their children baptised in the water of the holy well, to drink of it for the cure of their diseases, and to offer up vows and repeat prayers before the sacred cross. Strange as it may seem, Dick’s first impulse, when the identity of his whereabouts flashed upon him, was to dash through the doorway and scamper with all imaginable speed back to the cave. He was not more superstitious than other boys of his age; but in those days, before old beliefs and fancies had undergone the cold douche of science, people were credulous of omens and spells, blessings and curses, beneficent influences and the evil eye. From St. Cuby’s Well the aroma of sanctity had long since departed; according to village tradition, a murder of peculiar horror had once been committed there; and now it was shunned as a plague spot. No pilgrims came to kneel beneath the sacred roof; no children ever played hide and seek among its picturesque ruins; everybody, from the Squire downwards, avoided it, and at night not a man would have ventured within a hundred yards of its unhallowed precincts. Stories were rife of apparitions seen there; it was these ghosts of which Ike Pendry had spoken to John Trevanion on the night when he had overtaken the trudging pedestrian on the high road. Dick, of course, had no belief in ghosts, and regarded the stories with as much intellectual contempt as his father gave to the witch’s couplet. But his imagination was subject to impressions which his reason scorned; and in the gloom of the well-shaft, which the yellow rays of his candle rendered more awful than complete darkness could have been, these vague conceptions of murder, sacrilege, and midnight hauntings possessed his mind so completely as at first to overwhelm his common-sense. But he resolutely crushed down these figments of his imagination, told himself that such evil traditions might probably be traced to no more real origin than the failure of the spring of water, and decided to go back for his companion and put an end to their captivity by climbing up the iron steps to the surface of the cliff.