It was no longer the creek he had known.

It was edged with ice.
There was something dark and brooding about it now.

The sound it made was no longer the rippling song of summer and golden autumn.

There was a threat in its gurgling monotone--a new voice, as if a black and forbidding spirit had taken possession of it and was warning him that the times had changed, and that new laws and a new force had come to claim sovereignty in the land of his birth.
He drank of the water cautiously.

It was cold--ice-cold.