Prior, if anybody
had ever seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact, it was a
priory, and shared the fate of most priories--that is, the Tudor
gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned
it into his own private house; he did worse things, as you shall
hear. But the point here is that this is how the trick works, and
the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale. The
name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best maps
produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a
smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most
ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor. But it is spelled wrong and
pronounced right."
"Do you mean to say," asked Crane, quickly, "that there really was a
well?"
"There is a well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at the bottom of
it."
As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet
of water in front of him.
"The well is under that water somewhere," he said, "and this is not
the first tragedy connected with it. The founder of this house did
something which his fellow ruffians very seldom did; something that
had to be hushed up even in the anarchy of the pillage of the
monasteries. The well was connected with the miracles of some saint,
and the last prior that guarded it was something like a saint
himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr.
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