Excerpt from Madge O' the Pool: The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales When the January fog hangs heavy upon London it comes down upon the Pool as though it were sluiced there like a drain, or as a mass of garbage shot over a declivity in a waste place. The Pool is not a lovely spot in winter, though it has a beauty of its own on the rare days when the sun shines in an unclouded frosty sky, or when a north-wester comes down from the distant heights of Highgate and Hampstead, and slaps the incoming tide with short splashes of waves washed up by the downward current, till the whole reach of the Thames thereabouts is a jumble of blue and white and of gleaming if dirty greys and greens. On midwinter nights, too, when the moon has swung up out of the smoke, like a huge fire-balloon adrift from the. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.