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The wending brook dissected the cheerless moor, its peaty guts fetid in the evening fog. Dunlop Bravegullet's rubbers sank into the pitch soil as he forded at the narrows. He climbed the embankment, grappling at the elder vines that spindled from the breach. And there, kneeling on a patch of soggy moss, he cocked his head and leaned into the open, boggy crevasse. He stuck out his swollen gray tongue and scraped off a curl of the mire. As the taste of compressed, centuries-old decay settled down his throat, he felt a disturbing rumble in his bowels. In a blink of rapture the dominion of the soil filled his spirit. It was here that his people had toiled for eons and it was here that they had been buried. It was here that the sun rose and set, that the sheep grazed and died, that he was born and would be buried. Oh, how he yearned to render himself unto the bog, not years from now in the grave, but presently, while he could live to know its glory! He lowered his filthy woolen trousers, and in a transcendent spasm extruded a steaming pile of eternity.