To and fro it came about me for many years. Then the County Council found
me, and gave me decent burial. It was the first grave that I had ever
slept in. That very night my friends came for me. They dug me up and put
me back again in the shallow hold in the mud.

Again and again through the years my bones found burial, but always behind
the funeral lurked one of those terrible men who, as soon as night fell,
came and dug them up and carried them back again to the hole in the mud.

And then one day the last of those men died who once had done to me this
terrible thing. I heard his soul go over the river at sunset.

And again I hoped.

A few weeks afterwards I was found once more, and once more taken out of
that restless place and given deep burial in sacred ground, where my soul
hoped that it should rest.

Almost at once men came with cloaks and tapers to give me back to the mud,
for the thing had become a tradition and a rite. And all the forsaken
things mocked me in their dumb hearts when they saw me carried back, for
they were jealous of me because I had left the mud. It must be remembered
that I could not weep.

And the years went by seawards where the black barges go, and the great
derelict centuries became lost at sea, and still I lay there without any
cause to hope, and daring not to hope without a cause, because of the
terrible envy and the anger of the things that could drift no more.