It was about six feet long.

The woman, seeing his attention directed to it, took it eagerly and showed how it might be used, drawing him with her to the aperture over the shore and pointing out eagerly the landmarks by which she knew how far the shallow water extended at certain times of the tide.

Her topographical knowledge of all the sea's bed within about a mile of the high-water mark was extraordinarily minute, and Caius listened to the information she poured upon him, only now beginning to realize that she expected him to wear the dress, and take the iron pole, and slip from the old cellar into the tide when it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring.

It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it was intensely real.
"You said you would go." Some perception of his hesitation must have come to her; her words were strong with insistence and wistful with reproach.

"You said you would go and fetch her in to me before I die." Then Caius put back the dress she held on the rusty peg where it had hung for so long.
"I am a man," he said.