It was a village of fountains. They poured from the sides of houses,
bubbled up at street corners, sprang from stone troughs by the
roadside, and one even gushed from the very walls of the old Church
itself, and fell with a monotonous tinkle into a carved stone basin
beneath.
The old Church stood on a high plateau overlooking the lake. It jutted
out so far, on its great rock, that it seemed to overhang the
precipice; and as the neighbours walked upon the terrace on Sundays,
and enjoyed the shade of the row of plane trees, they could look down
over the low walls of the Churchyard almost into the chimneys of the
wooden houses clustering below.
There were wide stone seats on the terrace, grey and worn by the
weather, and by the generations of children who had played round them;
and here the mothers and grandmothers, with their distaffs in their
hands, loved to collect on summer evenings.
Often Terli had seen them from his home by the mountain torrent, for
he was so high up, he looked down upon the whole village; and he had
often longed to join them and hear what they were saying; but as he
was nothing but a River-Troll, he was not able to venture within sight
or sound of the water of the holy Church Fountain.
Anywhere else he was free to roam; teazing the children, worrying the
women as they washed their clothes at the open stone basins, even
putting his lean fingers into the fountain spout to stop the water,
while the people remained staring open-mouthed, or ran off to fetch a
neighbour to find out what was the matter.
