ventured into the water. There was once a very widespread superstition
concerning this Protean creature; and the women washing in the river
often had a figure of the Drac, in the form of a lizard, carved upon the
piece of wood with which they beat the linen, as a sort of talisman
against his seduction. The mother of the Anglore had told her of his
wiles; and one story impressed her above all--the story of the young
woman who, fascinated by the Drac, lost her footing in the water and was
carried whirling down into the depths. At the end of seven years she
returned and told her tale. She had been seized by the Drac, and for
seven years he kept her to nurse his little Drac.

The Anglore was never afraid while seeking the specks of gold in the
sunlight. But at night it was different. A gem of poetry is the scene in
the sixth canto, full of witchery and charm, wherein the imagination of
the little maid, wandering out along the water in the mysterious
moonlight, causes her to fancy she sees the Drac in the form of a fair
youth smiling upon her, offering her a wild flower, uttering sweet,
mysterious words of love that die away in the water. She often came
again to meet him; and she noticed that if ever she crossed herself on
entering the water, as she had always done when a little girl, the Drac
would not appear. These three or four pages mark the genuine poet and
the master of language. The mysterious night, oppressively warm, the
moonlight shining on the little white figure, the deep silence, broken
only by the faint murmur of the river and the distant singing of a
nightingale, the gleam of the glowworms, compose a scene of fantastic
beauty. The slightest sounds startle her, whether it be a fish leaping
at the surface of the water to seize a fly, the gurgling of a little
eddy, or the shrill cry of a bat. There is a certain voluptuous beauty
in the very sound of the words that describe the little nymph, kissed by
the moonbeams:--