The Drakestone — Oliver Onions

My tale is drawing to an end, since there is but one Yewdale left in it; but so extraordinary a thing was now to come to pass, and one that so truly might be called the Act of God, that, piecing together certain things I saw, others that were told me, and here and there a reasonable but unverified conjecture, I cannot close without relating it. Already I have spoken of the beginning of it, but you will hardly have noticed it, as men do not notice the first fresh and rise of the stream that afterwards causes a new flood-mark to be carved high on the buttress of the bridge as a memorial, or maybe fail to recall the first appearance of the face that later made all the difference in their lives; but the greatest mysteries and puzzles hardly seem so when, by the passing of time, you are able to read them backwards. At that time, then (to speak of things in the order in which they seemed to happen), I had been with Doctor Millman between four and five months, and was deep in the study of bones and tissues; for the doctor had been pleased to say that I had a cool head and a firm hand that would be better directed towards surgery than medicine. Once a fortnight or so I journeyed over to Undercliffe to see my grandfather and grandmother, occasionally taking Dorothy with me; and it was pitiful to see the ruined harvest that had been left to steam in the rainy fields--for the autumn had been more sodden even than the summer, and several of the smaller farmers had broken under the strain. One Friday, early in November, I had gone with Dorothy over to Undercliffe, and the rain had ceased in the morning. The rooks and crows cawed incessantly, and the white smoke of chimneys ascended straight into the air. Warm puffs of air moved on the Moss; a yellowish haze lay close...