The child remembers what seemed like endless days, but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years, when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy.

At low water, she remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he sat in his office near by watching her from the window.

That was when she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of the shadows on the stones.

Jeanette talked with her, but no one else could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself, stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock.

But Jeanette saw the snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too, and she could not make him understand who Ellen was.