"Which our other friend does not seem to be troubled with in any great degree!" said Captain Hector Coles, finishing out the sentence with a tone perceptibly sneering. Margaret looked round at him with a look which might have been one of inquiry, then turned away her face again and said: "No, I suppose not! Not more than half the world can be demigods: the others must be common people, or worse!" Whether Captain Hector Coles liked the tone of the reply, or not, is uncertain. At all events he scowled a little and said nothing more, while Mrs. Burton Hayley stole a look into the face of her daughter which had no hypocrisy in it and was full of wonder and trouble. Five minutes afterwards the company were all again at the mouth of the Flume, and there Halstead Rowan, a second time the hero of the day, joined them. "H. T." did not make his appearance: he had struck across, the Illinoisan said, without waiting for him, over the almost impassable fallen timber and through the spruce thickets, by the cross-path to the Pool. A few minutes more sufficed to re-seat the group in their wagons and to deposit them once more at the door of the Flume House, whence they took their way on foot, straggling in every picturesque variety of locomotion towards that equally-curious pendant of the Flume which is often missed by those who visit the better-known wonder. The Pool lay all alone, until this somewhat numerous company came to disturb its solitude. A singular object indeed--an exaggeration of all the other mountain amphitheatre fountains, nearly round, a score or more of yards in diameter, with the toe of the horse-shoe scooped out of a solid rock thirty or forty feet in height, smoothed and rounded as if cut by human hands, a bright, clear stream dashing down at that point, the rocks further away from the toe rising broken and jagged to the height of perhaps an hundred feet, and the mode of approach of the passengers a jagged line of ricketty steps, terribly perpendicular, sloping down from that highest point and presenting no temptations to the decrepit or the nervous. At the bottom of this singular basin the water, bright and clear in the few places where it ran shallow over the bleached stones, but under the shadow of the ledge so deep as to seem black as midnight. "Nobody here!--it doesn't seem like old times!" said an elderly gentleman who had visited the Pool many times in other days,--as the ladies were with some difficulty assisted down the steps. "No boatman, and not even a boat! Where is Charon, I wonder?" "Oh, yes, where _is_ Merrill?" asked another. "The man with the leaky scow and the white muslin awning, who always charged a York shilling for ferrying people over to the Elysian Fields lying among the rocks and logs yonder."