raymond f. jones Reflections of a Star EVERY SUMMER I and my brother Ben, who was two years older, used to swim in Brown’s Pool. The Pool was made by a natural spring in the hills above our little town of Thomasville. It was about thirty feet across, with clear, blue depths that seemed to go down to infinity. One of the kids in the neighborhood boasted he had touched bottom, but nobody believed him. The rest of us confided mysteriously to each other that Brown’s Pool had no bottom.
Sometimes we went up there at night, too. In the summer, when the water was very still because the underground spring wasn’t feeding very fast, you could see a star way down in the depths. It shown like a diamond far away in the water, and the faint ripples made it sparkle like a brilliant cold fire. We looked to the sky and tried to figure out which star was reflected so brilliantly, but we were never quite sure which one it was.
Then there came this summer when we started seeing funny-looking fish. Seldom had we seen fish of any kind, but now there appeared a whole raft of strange kinds that none of us had ever seen.
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