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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wagner Story Book, by Henry Frost
+
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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+
+Title: The Wagner Story Book
+
+Author: Henry Frost
+
+Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6443]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 14, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAGNER STORY BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by E. Barry Simpson, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WAGNER STORY BOOK
+
+[Illustration: "AT LAST WE CAN SEE SOMETHING IN THE FIRE."]
+
+THE WAGNER STORY BOOK
+
+FIRELIGHT TALES OF THE GREAT MUSIC DRAMAS
+
+BY WILLIAM HENRY FROST
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY SYDNEY RICHMOND BURLEIGH
+
+To
+
+Helen Krebbier
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE STOLEN TREASURE
+
+THE DAUGHTER OF THE GOD
+
+THE HERO WHO KNEW NO FEAR
+
+THE END OF THE RING
+
+THE KNIGHT OF THE SWAN
+
+THE PRIZE OF A SONG
+
+THE BLOOD-RED SAIL
+
+THE LOVE POTION
+
+THE MINSTREL KNIGHT
+
+THE KING OF THE GRAIL
+
+THE ASHES
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"AT LAST WE CAN SEE SOMETHING IN THE FIRE"
+
+"THE GOLD SHINES OUT SO BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL"
+
+"THE DAUGHTER OF THE GOD"
+
+"THE SUNLIGHT FOLLOWS HIM STRAIGHT INTO THE CAVE"
+
+"THEIR TREASURE IS THEIR OWN AGAIN"
+
+"THE KNIGHT OF HER DREAM"
+
+"HE SAW HER EYES BRIGHTER THAN THE STARS"
+
+"THROUGH THE BLACK STORM AND HIS OWN BLACKER DESPAIR"
+
+"AS IF THEY COULD NEVER GAZE ENOUGH"
+
+"THE STRANGEST FLOWERS GROW UP UNDER THEIR FEET"
+
+"THE KING OF THE GRAIL"
+
+
+
+
+THE STOLEN TREASURE
+
+
+There is a certain little girl who sometimes tries to find out when I
+am not over busy, so that she may ask me to tell her a story. She is
+kind enough to say that she likes my stories, and this so flatters my
+vanity that I like nothing better than telling them to her. One reason
+why she likes them, I suspect, is that they are not really my stories
+at all, the most of them. They are the stories that the whole world has
+known and loved all these hundreds and thousands of years, tales of the
+gods and the heroes, of the giants and the goblins. Those are the right
+stories to tell to children, I believe, and the right ones for children
+to hear--the wonderful things that used to be done, up in the sky, and
+down under the ocean, and inside the mountains. If the boys and girls
+do not find out now, while they are young, all about the strange,
+mysterious, magical life of the days when the whole world was young, it
+is ten to one that they will never find out about it at all, for the
+most of us do not keep ourselves like children always, though surely we
+have all been told plainly enough that that is what we ought to do.
+
+This little girl's mother is rather a strange sort of woman. I do not
+know that she exactly disagrees with us about these stories that we
+both like so much, but she seems to have a different way of looking at
+them from ours. I sometimes suspect that she does not even believe in
+fairies at all, that she never so much as thought she saw a ghost,
+that, if she heard a dozen wild horses galloping over the roof of the
+house and then flying away into the sky, she would think it was only
+the wind, and that she is no more afraid of ogres than of policemen.
+Still she is a woman whom one cannot help liking, in some respects.
+
+But one day she said something to the little girl that surprised me,
+and made me think that perhaps I had done her injustice. The child came
+to me with a face full of perplexity and said: "What do you suppose
+mamma just told me?"
+
+"I am sure I can't guess," I replied; "your mother tells you such
+ridiculous things that I am always afraid to think what will be the
+next. Perhaps she says that William Tell didn't shoot an apple off his
+little boy's head, or that the baker's wife didn't box King Alfred's
+ears for letting the cakes burn."
+
+"Oh, no," said the child, "it isn't a bit like that; she says that you
+can see pictures in the fire sometimes--men and horses and trees and
+all kinds of things."
+
+"Does she, indeed? And how does your mother know what I can see in the
+fire or what I can't see?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mean just you--yourself, I mean anybody. Now can you? I
+mean can anybody?"
+
+"Why, yes, if that is what you mean; I think some people can. It is the
+most sensible thing I have known your mother to say in a long time."
+
+"But how can anybody see such things? Can you see them? I have been
+looking at the fire ever so long, and I can't see anything at all but
+just the fire, the wood, and the ashes."
+
+"Let us look at it together," I said; and I put a chair that was big
+enough to hold both of us before the fireplace. "Just see how bright
+the fire is; look down into those deep places under the sticks, and see
+how it glows and shines like melted gold. Now, you know when you look
+into a mirror you can see pictures of the things in front of it--your
+own face, the walls of the room, the furniture. That is because the
+mirror is so bright that it reflects these things; yet the mirror is
+not bright enough to reflect anything except what is there before it,
+such things as you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands.
+But the fire can do better than that, for it is a great deal brighter
+than the mirror, and it is so bright that it can reflect thoughts. So
+you must think of the pictures first, and then, if you know just how to
+look for them in the fire, you will find them reflected there, and
+after a little while you will be surprised at the wonderful things you
+will see."
+
+"I don't know what you mean at all," said the child; "tell me what you
+can see in the fire now."
+
+"Very well. Suppose, then, first, that you almost close your eyes, but
+not quite, so that you will not see the fire so plainly, and it will
+all run together and look dim and misty. When I look at it in that way
+it seems to me to be fire no more, but water. It is as if we were down
+under a broad, deep river, and could see all the mass of water slowly
+eddying and whirling and flowing on above us, with just the little glow
+and glimmer of brightness that come down from the daylight and the air
+above. But there is one little spot that is brighter, right in the
+middle of the fire, where you see that one little yellow flame all by
+itself. In my picture, it is like a big lump of pure gold, resting on a
+point of rock that stands straight up from the bottom of the river. It
+is really gold, and magic gold at that, for you know wonderful
+treasures often lie at the bottoms of rivers. One of the wonderful
+things about this gold is that, if anybody could have a ring made of
+it, he could compel everybody else to obey him and serve him, and could
+rule the whole world.
+
+"Three forms I can see now moving backward and forward, and up and
+down, and around and around about the gold. Now they grow a little
+clearer. They are river nymphs, or something of the sort, and they are
+here to guard the gold, lest anybody should try to steal it. It would
+not be easy to steal, even if it had no guard, and knowing this has
+perhaps made these pretty keepers a little careless about it, so that
+now, instead of watching it very closely, they are swimming and diving
+and circling about, trying to catch one another, having the jolliest
+time in the world, and never thinking that there may be danger near."
+
+"And you can see all those things in the fire?" said the little girl.
+"I can't see any of them. How do you see them?"
+
+"Just as I told you at first, by thinking of them and then seeing the
+thoughts reflected there."
+
+"Well, tell me some more."
+
+"Look at that little dark spot under the fire. When I look at it in the
+way I have told you, it is the form of a dwarf. He is ugly and rough-
+looking, he is crooked, and he has a wicked face. He slips and tumbles
+slowly along, till he catches sight of the water nymphs, and they look
+so pretty and graceful and happy, as they chase one another about and
+up and down and around, that his cruel little eyes light up with
+pleasure, and he calls to them that he should like to come up and play
+with them too."
+
+"Oh, now I don't believe any of it at all," said the child; "I thought
+just for a little while you might know how to see all those funny
+things in the fire, but you can't hear people talk in the fire."
+
+"Oh, my dear child, you don't know very much about the fire if you
+think I can't see anything I want to in it, or hear anything I want to
+either. I tell you I can hear what this dwarf says, just as plainly as
+I can see him walk about. Still, if you don't believe any of it and
+don't care to know about the dwarf and the nymphs and the gold, perhaps
+you might better go and study your multiplication table, and I will
+find something else to do."
+
+"Oh, but I do want to know about them. Please tell me some more. What
+do the nymphs say to the dwarf? Can you hear that too?"
+
+"Of course I can hear it; they call to him to come up and play with
+them if he likes, and he clambers up over the rocks and trees to catch
+one of them after another, while they swim and glide away from him, and
+find it much better fun than chasing one another. It is good fun, no
+doubt, for the dwarf cannot swim like them, but only scrambles about in
+the most ridiculous way, with never any hope of catching one of them,
+except when she lets him come near her for a moment, to plague him by
+slipping away again quite out of his reach. At last he gets thoroughly
+tired and discouraged and angry, while the three sisters laugh at him
+and taunt him and chatter with one another, and have clearly enough
+forgotten all about the gold that they are supposed to be watching.
+
+"But see now how much brighter the fire is getting. It makes me think
+that something must have happened up above the river. The sun must have
+risen, or something of that sort, for everything looks clearer and the
+gold shines out so bright and beautiful, that the blear-eyed dwarf
+himself sees it and forgets all about trying to catch water nymphs in
+wondering what it is. He asks the nymphs, and they tell him about the
+ring that could be made of it if only it could be stolen from them; but
+it is of no use for him to try, they say, because it is a part of the
+magic of the gold that it can never be stolen except by some one who
+loves nobody in the world and has sworn that he will never love
+anybody, and it is clear enough that the dwarf is in love with all
+three of them at this very minute. When such a strange treasure as this
+was to be guarded, it was no doubt very clever to set three such
+beautiful creatures as these to watch it, for if a thief were not in
+love already, it is a hundred to one that he would be before he got
+near enough to the gold to steal it.
+
+"But the nymphs do not understand at all how much more a heartless
+little monster like this dwarf loves the glitter of gold than he could
+ever possibly love them. So, even while they are laughing at him, he is
+forgetting them completely, and then he swears a deep oath that as long
+as he lives he will never love any living thing. Now, if you can think
+of anything that anybody could do more wicked, more horrible, more
+cruel than that, you must know a great deal more about wicked and
+horrible things than you have any right to know. After that every kind
+of wrong is easy, and a little thing like stealing a lump of gold of
+the size of a bushel basket is a mere nothing. The dwarf scrambles up
+the point of rock again, while the nymphs, who think that he is still
+chasing them, swim far away from him, and he seizes the gold and
+plunges down to the bottom with it. The nymphs rush together again with
+a cry of horror and grief and fright, and in an instant everything is
+dark, as the flames of our fire suddenly drop down.
+
+[Illustration: "THE GOLD SHINES OUT SO BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL."]
+
+"But you see they fall only for a moment, and now, as they blaze up
+again, brighter than ever, I see another picture. It is on the hilltop
+above the river. The grass there is soft and fresh, the trees are cool
+and green, and the mellow light of morning is over them all. A light,
+white morning mist comes up from the river, and the sun, which has just
+risen from behind the purple hills, away off where the sky touches
+them, turns the mist into shifting and shimmering silver, so that it
+makes the whole scene look brighter instead of dimmer. On the hill
+across the river is a glorious sight. It is a castle, the grandest and
+most beautiful you ever saw. Its walls are thick and strong enough for
+a fortress, yet its towers and battlements look so light and graceful
+that you would think they might hold themselves up there in the air, or
+rest on the silver river mist, if there were no walls under them. As I
+look at the castle through the mist it seems half clear and solid and
+firm, and half wavering and dim, mysterious and magical, like a castle
+in a dream.
+
+"There is something magical about it, for it was all built in one night
+by two giants, and they built it for the gods themselves. And now you
+must be prepared to meet some very fine company, for right here before
+us are the great Father and the great Mother of the gods, looking
+across the river at their splendid new home."
+
+"Do you mean Jupiter and Juno?" the little girl asked.
+
+"No, these are not Jupiter and Juno; and the other gods whom we shall
+see soon, if the fire burns right, are not the gods you know already,
+but they are a good deal like them in some ways. The Father of the Gods
+is full of joy at having such a glorious castle, and the Mother of the
+Gods is full of dread at the price that must be paid to the giants for
+building it. A terrible price indeed it is, as she does not hesitate to
+remind him, for the gods have promised to give the giants the beautiful
+Goddess of Love and Youth. It was a foolish and wicked promise for them
+to make, foolish because if they kept it they could never in the world
+get on without her, and wicked because they did not intend to keep it.
+The homes of the gods, like any other homes, would be dreary enough
+without the Goddess of Love, but it is worse than that, for she has a
+garden where apples grow for the gods to eat; it is eating these apples
+that makes the gods always young, and nobody but her knows how to care
+for them, so that if she goes away the gods will begin to grow old at
+once and will soon die."
+
+"Were the apples like that--oh, what was it? you know the name of it--
+that the other gods used to eat?"
+
+"Ambrosia? Yes, something like it, but not quite. You know the gods who
+ate ambrosia would live forever and are living still; we have seen some
+of them ourselves up among the stars. But these gods have to eat the
+apples often, and they must get them from the Goddess of Love. This is
+much the better story of the two, I think, because it shows us how gods
+and other people, as long as they keep love with them, will be always
+young, no matter how many years they may live; and how, if they let it
+go away from them, they will be old at once, no matter how few their
+years.
+
+"All this the Father and the Mother of the Gods are talking over
+together now, and he tells her how the Fire God, who proposed the
+bargain in the first place, said that the price need never be paid and
+that he trusts the Fire God may yet find some way out of the trouble.
+Yet the giants must be made in some way to give up their price of
+themselves, for the Father of the Gods has the words of the promise cut
+upon his spear, and he cannot break a promise that he has once made.
+The Fire God has gone away now to search through the world for
+something that may be offered to the giants instead of the Goddess of
+Love. And now I see her come, running to the Father of the Gods for
+protection, and the other gods are here, to help her if they can, and
+the giants themselves have come to claim her for the building of the
+castle.
+
+"Well, to be sure, they are all in a fine state of excitement. The
+giants are big, dreadful-looking fellows, with clubs made of the trunks
+of trees, and the poor goddess does not want to go with them in the
+least. All the other gods declare, too, that she shall not go with
+them, and the giants insist that she shall. The Thunder God is there
+and he has a wonderful hammer, a blow of which is like a stroke of
+lightning. He is about to strike the giants with it, and that, you may
+be sure, would settle the whole matter, big as they are, but the Father
+of the Gods will not let him harm them. He has promised, and whatever
+happens he cannot break his word.
+
+"While everything is in this dreadful state, the Fire God comes back
+from his search. It is not a very cheering story that he has to tell.
+He has been through all the world, he says, and he has asked everywhere
+what there is that is as good for gods or giants, or anybody else, as
+the love of a woman, which makes those who have it always young. But
+the people in those days knew more than a good many of the people in
+these days, and everywhere they laughed at him and told him that he
+might as well give up his search, for he would never find what he
+sought."
+
+"What do you mean by 'the people in those days'?" the child asked; "I
+thought you said you could see them right here in the fire now."
+
+"So I can, but it is the beauty of these pictures in the fire that I
+can see things that happened years ago, thousands of years ago, if I
+like, just as well as things that happen now, and perhaps a little
+better. So you see the Fire God has not had very good luck, but as he
+was coming back, he says, he passed near where the river nymphs were,
+and they called to him, telling him that their beautiful gold had been
+stolen, and begging him to ask the Father of the Gods to get it back
+for them. They told him, too, about the wicked dwarf who stole it, and
+how, before he could steal it, he had to swear never again, as long as
+he lived, to love anybody or anything. The Fire God seems to have heard
+about the dwarf somewhere else, too, for he says that he has already
+made the magic ring out of the gold, that by the help of the ring he
+has compelled all the other dwarfs to obey him and serve him, and has
+piled up such a treasure of gold and jewels as was never seen before;
+and finally, that, if the gods are not careful, the dwarf will soon
+rule over them and the whole world besides.
+
+"So it seems that there is one person in the world who has found
+something which he thinks is worth more than love. And there are at
+least two others who are as foolish as he, though they may not be quite
+so wicked. And these are the giants, for when they hear the Fire God
+tell of the wonderful treasure that the dwarf has heaped together, they
+say to the gods that they think the dwarf is quite right, they would
+rather have all that gold than the love of any woman, and, if the gods
+will get it for them, they may keep their Goddess of Love and Youth.
+The Father of the Gods hesitates; how can he get the treasure? he asks.
+
+"'You can find some way to get it, if you like,' the giants reply.
+
+"'I will not get it for you; you shall not have it,' says the Father of
+the Gods.
+
+"'Then we will hold to our first bargain,' they answer, 'and take your
+Love Goddess with us. To-night we will bring her back; if you have the
+treasure ready for us, then you may keep her; if not, then you have
+lost her forever.' And they seize her and stride away, dragging her
+with them, while the gods look on in grief and fear. And well they may
+fear at the change that comes as soon as the beautiful goddess is gone.
+You can see the change yourself in the fire. If it did not fit the
+story that I am finding in it so well, I should say that the fire
+needed more wood, for it seems almost out; see how the blackened sticks
+are smouldering and smoking, with scarcely any bright flames at all.
+The smoke is spreading like an ugly gray cloud over everything; the
+trees and the flowers droop; the sky is dull and the grass is dingy;
+the castle looks grim and heavy, and no longer bright and graceful; the
+faces of the gods themselves grow pale and haggard; they feel that they
+are suddenly older. They have not eaten the apples of youth to-day, and
+nobody can get them but the one goddess who has gone. They know that
+they will grow older every hour and will soon die if they do not get
+her back, and the only way is to find the dwarf's treasure for the
+giants.
+
+"'Come quickly,' says the Father of the Gods, 'and let us get this
+treasure; let us hasten down under the ground where the dwarfs live,
+for we must have it to-night, when the giants come.'
+
+"There, where the dirty yellow smoke is pouring out between the sticks
+of wood at the top of the pile, I see a crevice in the rocks. The
+Father of the Gods and the Fire God go down into it, and the smoke
+comes thicker and blacker, and hides everything but those two, and I
+see them climbing down and down over the rough, sharp rocks, toward the
+caverns of the dwarfs, while the little tongues of flame shoot out at
+them from the fissures, as if they were trying to catch and burn and
+sting them, just as they shoot out from between the black, charred
+sticks here before our eyes.
+
+"It is a deep, dark cave that I see now, with little spots of light
+here and there, like forges, and there is the sound of anvils. The
+dwarfs live here, and they are all working hard, as they must now, for
+the dwarf who stole the gold and made the ring from it. I see him too,
+and he is scolding and beating another dwarf, who is his brother. It is
+all about a piece of fine metal work that he has set his brother to do,
+and now the brother wants to keep what he has made. But he drops it on
+the ground and the dwarf king, for a king he really is now, picks it up
+and claps it on his head. It is a helmet, made of delicate rings of
+steel linked together. It is a magic helmet, and anybody who wears it
+can disappear from sight whenever he likes, or can take any shape he
+chooses. In a minute the dwarf is no more to be seen, and in his place
+there is only a cloud of smoke. But he can still beat his brother, and
+presently he leaves him whining and crying on the ground, and the cloud
+floats away.
+
+"You are not to suppose because this dwarf is treated in this cruel way
+that he is any better than his brother who beats him. One of them is
+just as wicked as the other, and he deserves all he gets. So here,
+lying upon the ground and groaning, the two gods find him, as they come
+down into the cave. 'What is the matter?' they ask, and he tells them
+about the magic helmet. Then back comes the other dwarf, who wears the
+helmet and the ring, driving before him a crowd of his fellows, all
+laden down with gold and gems, and they throw them in a pile. They are
+so rich and dazzling, and there is such a quantity of them that the
+fire actually burns brighter there in the corner where they have heaped
+them up. The dwarf drives all his workmen away, and then sulkily asks
+the gods what they want here, for with his ring and his helmet he
+thinks that he is just as good as any of the gods.
+
+"The Fire God tells him that they have heard so much about his great
+wealth that they have come to see it, and now they find his treasure
+greater and finer than anything they ever saw before. At that the dwarf
+is flattered and begins to boast. 'This that you see is nothing,' he
+says; 'I shall soon have much more, and by the magic of my ring I mean
+to rule the whole world and you gods too.'
+
+"'But suppose,' says the Fire God, 'that some one should steal the ring
+from you while you were asleep?'
+
+"'That shows how little you know about it,' the dwarf answers. 'Why, do
+you see this magic helmet of mine? With this I can make myself
+invisible, or I can take any form I like, and so nobody can find me
+while I am asleep to steal the ring.'
+
+"'Oh, now you are telling us too big a story,' says the Fire God; 'it
+is nonsense to say you can take any form you like, helmet or no helmet;
+you can't expect us to believe that.'
+
+"At this the dwarf begins to get a little angry; 'I tell you I can,' he
+cries; 'I will prove it to you; I can change myself into anything; what
+shall it be?'
+
+"'Oh, whatever you like,' says the Fire God, 'only let it be something
+big and horrible to show just how much you can do.'
+
+"So, to show what he can do, in a second the dwarf changes himself into
+a horrible dragon, with slimy scales and a writhing tail, and eyes and
+jaws that look as wicked as the dwarf himself, and twice as savage. The
+Fire God pretends to be dreadfully frightened, and when the dwarf comes
+back to his own shape again he says: 'That was very good, but that does
+not seem so hard, after all. Now, the way for you to hide, it seems to
+me, would be to make yourself very small, so that you could slip into a
+crack in the rocks. You can puff yourself up like a dragon, of course,
+but can you make yourself small as easily? Oh, no, I cannot believe
+that.'
+
+"'I can be anything, anything, I tell you,' the dwarf cries, getting
+still more angry; 'I will be as small as you like,' and in another
+second he has changed himself into a toad, not much bigger than your
+hand, as slimy as ever, looking still just as wicked as the dwarf
+himself, and almost as ugly.
+
+"'Now is the time--quick!' cries the Fire God, and in an instant the
+Father of the Gods stamps his foot upon the toad and has him fast. The
+Fire God stoops and pulls the magic helmet off the toad's head, and
+instantly he is the dwarf again, but he is still firmly held under the
+god's foot, and they tie him with cords and drag him away with them, up
+among the rocks from which they came."
+
+"That is just the way Puss in Boots caught the ogre, when he turned
+himself into a mouse," said the little girl.
+
+"Yes, to be sure it is, but you know there are only a very few stories
+in the world, any way, and we cannot find new ones. The most we can
+ever do is to tell the old ones over in different ways, and after all
+it is better so, for old things are better than new almost always, as
+you will find when you get a little older yourself. But now, with the
+fire burning up a little better to help me, we are back above ground.
+Let us put on more wood and see if we cannot make it better yet. We are
+just where we were before, on the hill by the river and the castle of
+the gods. And back now come the two gods from under the ground,
+dragging the dwarf with them. 'And what will you give us now,' they
+cry, 'if we will untie you and let you go?'
+
+"'What must I give you?' he asks.
+
+"'You must give us the whole of your treasure,' they answer; 'we will
+not let you go for anything less.'
+
+"That seems a large price, but the dwarf is as crafty as he is wicked,
+though his craft seldom does him much good, and he thinks that even if
+he gives up all his treasure he can soon pile up as much more, with the
+help of the ring. So, by the power of the ring, he calls the dwarfs to
+bring him the treasure, and up they come with it, out of the cleft of
+the rocks, and they pile it in a great, glittering heap just there
+where the new fire is beginning to burn so bright. 'There is the gold,'
+cries the dwarf, 'let me go.'
+
+"'Not yet,' says the Father of the Gods; 'give us your ring first, that
+belongs to the treasure.'
+
+"At that the dwarf screams and struggles and writhes and curses the
+gods, but it is all of no use; the Father of the Gods tears the ring
+from his finger, and then they untie him and tell him to take himself
+off where he will. And now, as he goes, he lays a terrible curse on the
+ring. To every one who shall ever gain it, he swears, shall come ill
+luck, misfortune, sorrow, terror, and death; let him rule the world if
+he will, never shall he be happy; everyone shall long for the ring, and
+to him who gets it, it shall bring misery and ruin. Truly the dwarf has
+gained little by stealing the gold from the river nymphs, but the gods
+have done wrong as well in stealing it from him, and they are doing
+wrong still in not giving it back to the nymphs; so they must suffer
+too.
+
+"But it is not yet time for that, for now, as the fire burns up, the
+whole picture grows brighter again. That is because the giants are
+bringing back the Goddess of Love and Youth, to see if the treasure is
+ready for them. The trees lift up their branches again and the happy
+sunlight pours down through them; the flowers open their eyes to see
+it; the sky is clear and bright, and the grass is again fresh; while
+the faces of the gods, who run to meet their sister, look young and
+happy as before. Only the castle is still hidden by the shining silver
+river mist. The giants have come near. 'Is the ransom ready for us?'
+they cry.
+
+"'There is your treasure.' says the Father of the Gods, 'take it and be
+gone.'
+
+"'We must see that it is enough first,' they answer; 'our treasure must
+be as much as your goddess, so you must pile it up before her till she
+is quite hidden by it; then we will take it, and you shall have her
+back.'
+
+"They heap up the gold and the jewels before the goddess, higher and
+higher, till everything is gone from the old pile to the new one. Then
+one of the giants looks over it and still sees the gold of her hair
+above the gold of the treasure. 'Give me that helmet that you carry,'
+he says to the Fire God, 'to put on the top.' and he gives it. Now the
+other giant peeps through a chink in the pile and sees one of her eyes.
+'Quick,' he cries to the Father of the Gods, 'give me that ring you
+wear to stop this chink.'
+
+"'No,' says the Father of the Gods, 'you shall not have that; it is the
+ring that gives the power to rule the world, and I will keep it.'
+
+"' Very well, then,' say the giants, 'we will have no more to do with
+you, and we will take the goddess back with us.'
+
+"All the gods stand terrified and pale. Will their great father let the
+Goddess of Love be taken from them again, and must they all grow old
+and die, that he may keep this ring? Everything grows dark again, as
+our fire here drops down; only there is that pale blue flame that gives
+no light, away at the back of the hearth. And now, right in the pale
+blue flame, rises the form of a woman out of the ground. It is the
+Earth Goddess, the wisest woman in the world, who knows all that ever
+was, all that is, and all that ever shall be. She speaks to the Father
+of the Gods and tells him to give the ring to the giants, for the curse
+that the dwarf has laid upon it will surely destroy him who keeps it.
+Then she sinks out of sight, and the Father of the Gods takes from his
+finger the ring, and gives it.
+
+"And even while the giants are stowing the treasure in a sack to carry
+it away, they fall to quarrelling about how it shall be divided, and
+one of them strikes the other a terrible blow with his club which lays
+him dead upon the ground. Then he strides away with the treasure,
+leaving the gods filled with horror at the first fatal work done by the
+curse of the ring.
+
+"Yet only for a moment; their grand new castle is ready for them now.
+High up upon a rock stands the Thunder God. He swings his hammer and
+the black clouds roll around him. The thunder mutters, and lightning
+flames flash out from the dark vapors. The fire flickers and blazes up
+again, the clouds part and melt away, and all is light at last. A
+rainbow reaches across the river from shore to shore, and the gods
+slowly walk across upon it toward their castle. Up from the river, far
+below them, comes a sad cry of the nymphs, begging the gods to give
+them back their gold. But the gods do not heed it. They rest upon the
+rainbow, gazing only at their castle, as it stands before them,
+stately, graceful, radiant, and rosy in the warm glow of the sunset."
+
+"And did you really, really see it all in the fire?" the little girl
+asked, after she had thought it all over for a few minutes. "It sounds
+just as if it was a story you had read in a book."
+
+"Well, perhaps I may have seen something, or heard something, or read
+something of the kind somewhere," I replied, "but you know I told you
+at first that you must think of the pictures before you could see them
+reflected in the fire."
+
+The little girl sat still and thought about it again for a time. "I
+don't believe you saw any pictures in the fire at all," she said at
+last.
+
+
+
+
+THE DAUGHTER OF THE GOD
+
+
+"If you say you can see all those things in the fire," said the little
+girl, with an air of doubt not yet quite overcome, "I suppose I shall
+have to believe it, but I don't see how. I try to think of them the way
+you said, but I don't see them in the fire a bit. Can you see them all
+the time?"
+
+"It makes a good deal of difference how I feel about it," I answered,
+"and a little difference how the fire burns. To-night, you see, the
+fire does not burn quite as it usually does. It is cold out of doors,
+and there is a wind that comes in gusts and blows different ways. It
+gives the fire a good draught, and on the whole it burns rather
+fiercely, but when the wind goes down the fire goes down a little too,
+and when the wind changes it blows a puff of smoke down the chimney now
+and then. Altogether it is not a well-behaved fire at all, and I am
+afraid if we try to see things in it, some of them will be rather rough
+and rude, and none of them very cheerful. Still, if you would like to
+try--"
+
+"Oh, do try," the child said, "I like nice gloomy things."
+
+"Very well. Just now the fire is so fierce and hot that it seems to me
+nothing less than a house on fire. It is a house that stands all alone
+in the woods. Before it was set on fire a boy and a girl lived there.
+Neither of them had any mother, but the boy's father lived with them
+and took care of them, going out hunting and leaving the boy and the
+girl together, till the boy was old enough to go hunting with him, and
+then the girl was left alone. They were very happy there together, all
+three of them, and the father always thought that the girl would
+sometime grow up and be his son's wife. But now, while they are
+hunting, a robber has come and has burned the house, and he takes the
+girl with him and carries her off to his own house, far away among the
+mountains.
+
+"After this it is not so pleasant roaming the woods and hunting all
+day, with no house to go back to and no greeting of a bright face in
+the evening. To make it still worse, one day, while they are hunting,
+the poor boy loses sight of his father and never finds him again. So
+now he is quite alone, but he still lives in the woods in the old way
+till he grows to be a tall, strong, handsome young man. Perhaps he is
+all the stronger and the better fighter because the most of his
+enemies, and his friends too, for that matter, have been wild beasts.
+That he has had one good enemy I know, because the coat that he wears
+is the skin of a bear.
+
+"And all this time the girl has been kept a prisoner at the house of
+the robber, and she has grown up as well, now, to be a tall, beautiful
+woman. At times, no doubt, the robber has treated her well enough, and
+at times, I am afraid, not so well. But always he has urged her and has
+tried to make her promise to be his wife, and now, after all these
+years, at last she has promised. She has never forgotten the brave boy
+whom she used to love, but the robber has told her that he is dead, and
+finally she has come to believe it and has no more any hope of ever
+being happy.
+
+"I am looking right into the robber's house now. It is a strange house,
+for right in the middle of it stands a large tree, which grows up
+through the roof and spreads its branches over the house. And more
+wonderful still, there is a sword sticking in this tree, up to the
+hilt. Perhaps I might better tell you something about this sword before
+we go any farther. Do you remember the gold that was stolen from the
+river nymphs, the other night, when we were watching the fire, and the
+magic ring that the dwarf made of it? Of course you do, and you
+remember too how the Father of the Gods got it and paid it to the
+giants for building his castle, and would not give it back to the river
+nymphs, and how one of the giants killed the other and kept all the
+treasure. Well, the Father of the Gods has been learning and thinking a
+good deal since then, and he has begun to see what a great wrong he did
+when he put the gold to his own uses, instead of giving it back to the
+nymphs. It is no light punishment that falls on gods when they do
+wrong, and he sees that for this sin he and all the other gods who live
+with him in his castle must at last be destroyed utterly. Yet he still
+hopes to save them if only the gold, or at least the ring, can be given
+back again to the nymphs.
+
+"Now, the giant who took all the treasure carried it away to a deep
+cave in the side of a mountain, and then, by the help of the magic
+helmet, he changed himself into a horrible, fierce, fiery, poisonous
+dragon, so that he might stay in the cave and guard it. And there he
+has stayed guarding it ever since. You will see at once that the
+treasure never would do him any good in that way, but giants are
+usually stupid, and he could not think of anything better to do with
+it. A boy who has a penny and knows enough to buy a penny whistle with
+it is richer than this dragon giant. Yet he guards the treasure pretty
+well, and the Father of the Gods cannot take it away from him, and
+cannot help anybody else to take it away from him, because he paid it
+to him for the castle, and to touch it now would be to break his
+promise. Yet he wishes that somebody, without his help, would kill the
+dragon and give the gold back to its real owners. This would not really
+do him any good, for his own old sin would still be just as great, and
+he knows it; yet he has a strange kind of hope that it may somehow help
+him. But the dragon is so big and fierce and fiery and poisonous, that
+nobody could ever hope to kill him except the very greatest of heroes,
+and one who simply did not know what fear meant. Even such a hero might
+have a good deal of trouble about it, if he did not have a sword that
+was just as keen and strong, just as sharp and firm and true as
+himself. So, that he may not want for such a good blade, the Father of
+the Gods has made a magic sword. No one but a god could make a sword
+like this, and he has driven it up to the hilt into the great tree in
+the robber's house. It is quite safe there, for the magic of it is that
+nobody but the bravest, strongest, truest hero living can ever draw it
+out, but for him it will be easy. There are some things besides drawing
+swords out of trees which can be done easily by men who are brave and
+strong and true, and which no other man can do at all.
+
+"All this time I have been looking into the robber's house. There is a
+storm outside, worse than the wind that is troubling our fire. It howls
+above the house, and tears at the branches of the tree, till even the
+great trunk shivers and trembles and makes the roof creak and groan.
+Suddenly the door is burst open, and in, out of the storm, rushes a
+man, and falls before the fire as if he were so weary that he could
+move no more. Then from another room of the house comes the woman who
+has promised to be the robber's wife, the girl who once lived in the
+house that the robber burned. When she sees the stranger lying before
+the fire, she lifts him up and brings him a big drinking-horn, and
+tells him to stay and rest till the robber comes home. Then he looks at
+her, and she seems to him the kindest, the sweetest, and the loveliest
+woman he has ever seen.
+
+"Soon the robber comes home, and he asks the stranger what he is and
+how he came here. Then the stranger tells him all the story that I have
+told you of the burning of the house where he lived with his father,
+and how since then he has wandered the woods and has fought with the
+wild beasts and with his enemies. As soon as he tells that, the woman
+knows that the boy whom she used to love so long ago is not dead, but
+is sitting here before her, and the hope comes to her that he may take
+her away from this place, so that she may not have to be married to the
+robber. Then she asks the stranger why he is unarmed, and he says that
+he fought to rescue a woman from her enemies; he killed some of them,
+but the others were so many that they broke his spear and his shield,
+and he had to save himself from them, and so it was that he came to
+this house.
+
+"At this the robber grows red and pale with anger. He has heard of
+the fight, and the men who were killed were his friends. 'Stay here
+to-night,' he says; 'while you are in my house I cannot harm you, but
+to-morrow you must go out and fight with me for killing my friends.'
+
+"The robber and the woman have gone away and the stranger is left
+alone. Sad and gloomy enough are his thoughts, for to-morrow he must
+fight with the robber, and he has no sword, no spear, no shield. The
+fire before him dies down, as our fire dies down too, for the moment,
+and as all his hope grows darker and colder. And then, just as his life
+and the world and the future seem blackest, the woman comes back. Why
+should her coming bring him hope? He could not tell, perhaps, yet her
+very presence cheers him; misfortune and death seem not so near when
+she is by, and not so terrible, even should they come. He may not know
+why it is, but I know, and so do you.
+
+"She hastens to him and shows him the sword in the tree. She tells him
+of its magic; he must be the hero to draw it out, she says, and then,
+in the fight to-morrow, he must overcome his enemy and give her revenge
+for all she had suffered from him. And how gladly he will do her
+bidding! He seizes the sword and draws it quickly out of the tree,
+while her eyes gaze at him and are filled with joy. The hero has come--
+her hero. He holds the wonderful magic sword in his hand, but only for
+a moment he looks upon its long, gleaming, beautiful blade. Then he
+turns to her again. They twine their arms about each other and together
+they leave this hateful house. And now, of a sudden, it is as if their
+two hearts were all the world, as indeed they are, to each other, for
+all around them the storm was stilled; the winter is gone and it is
+spring; the peaceful moonlight fills the happy woods with a soft glory;
+sweet airs breathe tenderly on them and on the flowers in their path;
+quiet voices speak to them out of the budding trees; and so together
+they are gone into the forest.
+
+"The Father of the Gods has done more than I have told you yet to guard
+against the end which he knows must come, in spite of all that he can
+do. He has fancied that his castle might be safer if he were to fill it
+with strong warriors to fight for him in any need. Therefore, wherever
+battles are fought he sends his nine daughters to choose the bravest of
+the men who are killed and to bring them to his castle. Each of these
+daughters has a horse which flies through the air faster than any bird.
+When the fallen heroes have come thus to the halls of the gods, they
+are brought to life and their wounds are healed by means that the gods
+know how to use, and they live there, feasting day after day with other
+heroes. And lest they should forget their old skill and bravery in
+fighting, every day they have a battle and many of them are killed and
+chopped to pieces by the others' swords, but at sunset they are all
+alive and well again, and they go back together to their feast in the
+halls of the gods.
+
+"It is one of these daughters of the god, one of these choosers of
+heroes, whom I see before me now. I wish that I could make you see her.
+She is more than a beautiful woman, and also she is less. She is tall
+and her form is strong, yet light and buoyant. She is dressed all in
+armor, and she has a spear and a shield which gleams and glistens like
+a beacon-light for an army. She herself, as I see her here, is as
+graceful and as full of warm life as a flame of the fire, the same hot
+glow stirs her heart and moves her to the same eager, free action. Her
+face is as clear and pure as the fire itself, and almost as radiant as
+her silver shield, while the gold of her hair breaking from under the
+light of her helmet, outshines them all. Beating under her bosom,
+thrilling through her form, glowing in her cheeks, and beaming from her
+eyes, is the joy of life and strength and beauty. Yet where is the
+tenderness that one would seek in a woman's eyes? A glad light shines
+in hers, but it is not softened by any kindly ray of gentleness or
+mercy. Where is the sweetness of a woman's lips? Hers are calm and
+beautiful, but they tempt no more than a stain of blood upon the snow.
+What is there in her face that could melt into a woman's compassion and
+pity? Her face is not cruel, not unkind, only still, stern, and placid
+as marble. She is not a woman, you know; only a goddess--a war goddess.
+
+"Just now the Father of the Gods is telling his daughter of the fight
+that is to come between the robber and the hero who won the sword, and
+he commands her to help the hero to win. She is delighted at this, for
+she loves all brave, true heroes as he does, but she has scarcely left
+her father when the Mother of the Gods comes, riding furiously through
+the air in a chariot drawn by two rams. She has heard of the fight too,
+and she takes quite a different view of it. 'This man whom you would
+save and help,' she says, 'has taken the woman away from the man whose
+wife she promised to be. Is that all you care for a promise? He must be
+punished; you must help his enemy to kill him.'
+
+[Illustration: "DAUGHTER OF THE GOD."]
+
+"You see she cares nothing at all about heroes, but to her a promise is
+a promise. And the Father of the Gods himself is very particular about
+promises, as you must remember, so he is forced to say that he will not
+help the hero. But that is not enough for her; he must command his
+daughter not to help him. She shall not, he says, but that is not
+enough; he must help his enemy and see that he wins. This is hard for
+the Father of the Gods, for he loves the hero, and if he is left to
+himself he must win, with his magic sword, yet he cannot choose; the
+promise has been broken, and he gives his word that the hero shall die.
+
+"The Father of the Gods is left alone, and again his daughter comes to
+him. He tells her sadly that she must help the robber in the fight, and
+that the hero must die. She is as sad as he at this command, for all
+that she ever wishes is to do what he would have her do, and she knows
+that, though he says that the hero must die, yet he would have him
+live. But his word is given, and, full of sorrow, the god and his
+daughter part. And now comes the hero himself, with his bride. She is
+fearful of what may befall him in the fight, and would have him flee
+farther away. He will not do that, and he tries to cheer her, till she
+faints and sinks down at his feet. Then, beautiful and sad, but still
+calm, stern, and placid, the Daughter of the God stands before him.
+
+"'Soon,' she says to him, 'you must come with me to the castle of the
+gods. There the Father of the Gods will welcome you, there your own
+father, whom you lost so long ago, waits for you, there you will fight
+and feast with heroes, and the daughters of the god will serve you.'
+
+"'And shall this woman here,' he asks, 'whom I love, go with me and
+with you there?'
+
+"'No,' she answers, 'this woman cannot go.'
+
+"'Then I will not go,' he replies; 'gladly I would stand before the
+Father of the Gods, gladly I would see my own father again and the
+heroes and the daughters of the god, but not without her; I will not go
+with you; leave us here.'
+
+"If the daughter of the god were a woman she would understand all this,
+but now it would make her impatient, if anything could. She cannot know
+and cannot feel why this man, who has had only trouble and ill luck all
+his life, should choose to stay and wait for more trouble and ill luck
+with this one poor woman who lies at their feet, fainting and knowing
+not even that she is alive, rather than to sit and feast with gods and
+heroes. How little a war goddess can really know about brave men!
+
+"Yet she does know that her father, whose wishes are her own, wishes
+this woman to live, and that she will be in danger after her hero has
+left her; so she tells him that he may leave his bride with her and she
+will protect her. But the man is still more unreasonable. He says that
+she is cruel and hard-hearted. That is unjust, for she is not cruel. He
+says too that the woman shall die rather than be left with her. If he
+must die, he will kill the woman, too, and he is about to do it, when
+the Daughter of the God holds his hand. She thinks only now of how much
+her father longs that this man may live; she resolves that in spite of
+the command she will save him; she tells him that he shall have her
+help in the fight, and she leaves him, just as there comes a noise and
+a shout of the robber with his men and his dogs hunting for the hero to
+kill him.
+
+"See how the black smoke is driven down the chimney by the changing
+gusts of wind. It is like dark clouds gathering over the sky and
+dropping down upon the mountain, so that it is hard to see anything at
+all. The fire goes down, too, and its flames dart and flicker in
+sudden, angry flashes. Some of them are like lightning, brightening the
+whole scene for an instant, and then I can see the hero and the robber
+in their fight, springing and thrusting and striking at each other so
+that it seems as if they must both be killed a dozen times over. Again
+in the sparkle of the fire I see the gleaming of the magic sword, as
+the hero whirls it above his head and strikes at his enemy. Then comes
+a flare of flame that shines from the shield of the Daughter of the
+God, as she throws it over the hero to protect and save him. It is all
+in vain, for there comes a hot, red glow in which for an instant all
+the rest is lost, and now, in the midst of it stands the Father of the
+Gods himself. The daughter falls back helpless before him, and he
+stretches his spear toward the hero. The magic sword falls upon the
+spear and is shivered to pieces. Nothing indeed could shatter that
+blade but the spear of the god who made it, but with that spear to help
+him the robber springs upon his enemy and his sword is through his
+heart, and he is fallen.
+
+"The Daughter of the God has come back to where the woman lay, she has
+lifted her from the ground and has laid her across her horse's saddle
+as if she were dead; she leaps upon his back and they are galloping
+away like the wind. The Father of the Gods has avenged the broken
+promise; he has killed the hero whom he loved, and now he turns for one
+moment toward the robber whom he has helped to win the fight. Only once
+the god waves his hand toward him and the robber falls dead; he will
+fight and kill brave men no more. But a harder task than all is to come
+for the Father of the Gods; how shall he deal with his own daughter,
+who has disobeyed him?
+
+"The fire is burning a little better now, but it does not yet seem to
+be quite on good terms with the wind outside. The smoke is going up
+again instead of down, and that is an improvement. It rises in sudden
+puffs and flurries, like clouds flying across the sky after a storm.
+The shadows of the clouds fall upon a mountain height, a rugged, rocky,
+wild, beautiful place, where the daughters of the god are meeting to
+ride home together with the heroes they have brought from some field of
+battle. Now and then, as the quick flames leap up into the smoke, I can
+see another and another coming, riding on her flying horse, racing with
+the driving wind and the hurrying clouds, each with her warrior lying
+before her across her saddle, and so alighting here and joining her
+sisters. They are all here at last except the one Daughter of the God
+whom we have seen before, and now she comes, but she brings no warrior
+across her saddle, only the poor woman with whom she fled from the
+fight.
+
+"She tells her sisters how she has disobeyed their father, and she begs
+them to protect her and the woman against his anger. They dare not help
+her; never has one of them done anything that was not his will. What
+can she do? He is coming in pursuit of her; sooner or later he must
+find her, but she may at least save the woman. She bids her flee alone
+while she waits with her sisters for her father and her punishment to
+come. Far away, she tells her, there is a deep forest, and in the
+forest is a cave where the horrible dragon that was once the giant
+keeps and guards his treasure. So much does the Father of the Gods
+dread the curse that the wicked dwarf laid upon the ring, and the doom
+which he knows is coming to himself because of his own sin, that he
+never wanders there. To this forest she must go, and there she may find
+a refuge. The Daughter of the God gives the woman the fragments of the
+broken magic sword, which she has brought with her from the field of
+the fight, and bids her go.
+
+"And now, with angry lightnings flashing all around him, comes the
+Father of the Gods. Never before has he been shaken by such a storm as
+this. His daughter whom he loved more than all the others, has
+disobeyed him. Never before has she done anything but that which it was
+his will that she should do. Now she has known his will, she has heard
+his command, and she has broken it. She stands before him, sorrowful,
+but still calm, stern, and placid, and asks what is to be her
+punishment. She has brought her doom upon herself, he answers, and now
+she must be a war goddess no more, but only a woman. He must kiss her
+once, and all the strength and the valor and the pride of the goddess
+will be gone. Then she will sink to sleep, and here on this rocky
+mountain height she must lie till some man comes and awakes her, and
+she must be a woman only and his wife.
+
+"Very dreadful this seems to the poor war goddess, but it is because
+she has never been a woman, and does not know much about women. To me
+it does not seem dreadful at all. It is much better and sweeter and
+nobler, I believe, to be the best that a woman can be than the
+strongest and greatest and proudest that a goddess can be. And I hope
+you will always remember what we see here in the fire to-night, and if
+you ever feel that there is any danger of your being a goddess, or if
+anybody ever tells you that you are one, then let somebody kiss you and
+make you a woman.
+
+"But to one who has so long been used to wearing armor and riding
+through the air, and choosing the bravest of the fallen heroes, and
+bearing them to the castle of the gods, the change may well seem hard
+to suffer at first. So the Daughter of the God thinks that no heavier
+punishment could have been found for her. Her sisters think so, too,
+and they beg their father to have mercy on her, but he sternly bids
+them be silent and to leave him. Now the Daughter of the God tells him
+how she tried to do what he would have her do; she knew that he loved
+the hero and hated the robber, and that his command to her was given
+unwillingly; she hoped to gain for him the wish of his heart, in spite
+of his words, and she threw her shield over the hero.
+
+"It is useless; he cannot stay her punishment now, but his anger is all
+gone and he is filled with sorrow like her own. He loves her still,
+more than any other daughter, and now he will never have her beside him
+in the halls of the gods again, never again see her ride to the battle,
+never see her return with brave men to guard his house, never again
+speak to her as he could to no other, and tell her all that is in his
+heart, never again see her glad, deep, answering eyes look into his,
+full of sympathy and help. One thing yet she begs: if all that they
+have been to each other, the god and his daughter, must be no more, if
+she must sleep and wait here for an unknown husband to wake her, she
+prays him to set some guard around her, a wall of fire, that no one but
+a brave man, the bravest of men, may win her for his bride.
+
+"Yes, he will do this; she shall be shut in by fire and none shall ever
+come to her but the bravest of heroes, one who knows no fear at all. No
+one who fears even his own terrible spear, that spear which broke the
+magic sword that he himself had made, shall ever awake her who was his
+daughter, and now is to be his daughter no more. He draws her to him
+for one last time; he kisses her lips and they are silent; he kisses
+her eyes and they close. He lays her on a bank of soft moss; he closes
+her helmet and covers her with her shield. Near by her horse lies upon
+the ground asleep too; the flowers among the grass and in the crevices
+of the rocks droop their drowsy heads; the winds as they pass make no
+noise. He touches the point of his spear to the ground. Instantly the
+fire springs up; it makes a fierce, raging ring around the rock; surely
+only one who knows no fear can ever pass it. The Father of the Gods is
+gone. Now we can see nothing but the fire streaming up and exulting in
+its life and its hot defiance of all but the bravest; but there in the
+midst of it lies the Daughter of the God, asleep till her lover shall
+call her with a kiss to come with him and be a woman."
+
+The little girl's mother had come into the room and had heard the last
+of the story. "Isn't it time," she said, "that the daughter of somebody
+else was asleep, too, if she wants to grow to be a woman?"
+
+"It is late," I had to admit. "Well, the Daughter of the God is safe
+for the present. Perhaps some other time, when we have a better-behaved
+fire, we may see something of the lover."
+
+
+
+
+THE HERO WHO KNEW NO FEAR
+
+
+"Don't you think the fire is very good to-night?" the little girl
+asked.
+
+"Yes, it is certainly very good indeed," I admitted.
+
+"I should think," she said, "that anybody that could see things in
+fires might see very nice things in this one."
+
+When she who might command deigns thus delicately to make a mere
+suggestion, it is the part both of chivalry and of loyalty to obey. I
+should feel that having my head chopped off was altogether too good for
+me if I hesitated at such a time. "Come," I said, "and let us see what
+the fire really looks like. What does it look like to you?"
+
+"Oh, it doesn't look like anything at all to me, only just the fire.
+What does it to you?"
+
+"It looks like a fire to me too, but it is the fire of a smith's forge.
+The place where it is looks half like a room and half like a cavern. It
+is all of rocks, but there is the forge and there are the chimney and
+the anvil and the bellows and all sorts of smith's tools."
+
+"You can see things all around the fire, just the same as in it, can't
+you?" said the child.
+
+"Oh, to be sure; when I want to see these things that make themselves
+into stories, I can see them almost anywhere, only I think the fire is
+a particularly good place. And who do you think is working at the
+forge? It is an ugly little dwarf, the very one whom we saw the other
+night, who made the magic helmet, the brother of the one who stole the
+treasure from the river nymphs. You remember he was a clever smith,
+else he never could have made that wonderful helmet. Now he is at work
+here trying to make a sword. And he does make a sword too, but he does
+not seem pleased with it when it is finished, and he leaves off his
+work and sits down, with a very dissatisfied, sulky, ugly look in his
+face.
+
+"It would be hard for anybody to look more unlike the dwarf than the
+person I see now coming into the cave. He is a boy, or perhaps he would
+rather be called a young man, and I shall be glad to call him whatever
+he likes. He is dressed in skins and wears a little silver horn at his
+side. If the dwarf is short and ugly, he is tall and handsome; if the
+dwarf's face has a scowl of wicked hatred and cunning, his has a smile
+that beams with kindliness and candor; if the dwarf is old and crooked
+and rough and hairy, he is young and straight and graceful and fair. In
+short, you surely never saw a young man who looked more free, happy,
+generous, noble, strong, and bold than he. It makes one more good-
+humored to look at him, and the sunlight follows him straight into the
+cave. Something else follows him too, for he is leading a big brown
+bear by a cord twisted around its neck. He sends the bear at the dwarf,
+who screams and runs away in terror. The young man seems to have caught
+the bear in the woods just to frighten the dwarf, and he lets it go
+again when the dwarf tells him that the sword is finished and ready for
+him. He takes the sword and looks at it scornfully. It is good for
+nothing, he says. He strikes it upon the anvil and breaks it into a
+dozen pieces. He is a little particular about his swords; he does not
+like them unless he can chop anvils with them.
+
+"Before we try to see any more, perhaps I ought to tell you something
+about this wonderful youth and why he lives here in the cave with the
+dwarf. He was born here. This is the forest where the treasure is
+hidden that was paid to the giants for building the castle of the gods.
+It is guarded, as you know, by the giant who killed his brother so that
+he might have the whole of it, and he has changed himself into a
+horrible dragon, by the magic helmet, so that he may guard it better.
+The young man's mother was the woman whom the Daughter of the God sent
+away into this forest to save her from the anger of the Father of the
+Gods, as you remember. She took refuge here in the dwarf's cave and she
+died soon after her son was born, and then the dwarf kept the boy and
+brought him up. But it was not because he cared for him at all or had
+the least kindly feeling for anybody. It was just because he wanted, as
+so many others wanted, that rich treasure and the magic helmet and the
+magic ring with the curse upon it.
+
+"Now, you see, the boy's mother gave him the pieces of the broken magic
+sword and told him to keep them for the boy. He knew something about
+the sword and so he got it into his head that this was the very sword
+that would sometime kill that dragon. And since this boy was to have
+the sword, he thought, too, that he might very likely grow up to be the
+man who would kill the dragon. Do you see, then, why he has kept him
+and fed him and brought him up so carefully? It was just because he was
+so cunning and cruel and selfish that he took good care of the boy. He
+knew very well that he himself would never dare to go near enough to
+that dragon for it to breathe on him, but he thought: 'Some day I will
+give this boy the magic sword and make him go and kill the monster with
+it, and then I will kill him and get all the treasure, with the helmet
+and the ring, and then I shall be the ruler of all the dwarfs, of men,
+of the gods themselves, and of the whole world.'
+
+[Illustration: "THE SUNLIGHT FOLLOWS HIM STRAIGHT INTO THE CAVE."]
+
+"So the baby that the dwarf took and tended at first has grown to be
+this noble, brave, generous young man, and he hates the dwarf as anyone
+as good and strong as he must hate anything so cowardly and mean and
+wicked. All these years the dwarf has never told him anything about his
+mother or how he came to be living with him here in the cave. But now
+of a sudden the young man asks the dwarf some questions and shows that
+he means to treat him very roughly if he does not answer them. So the
+dwarf tells him a little of what I have told you, and to prove that
+what he says about his mother is true he shows him the pieces of the
+broken sword.
+
+"The young man gets interested in these at once, you may be sure. 'That
+was a good sword,' he cries; 'that is the sword I must have; mend it
+for me, dwarf, and mend it quickly. I will go into the forest, and, if
+it is not done when I come back, you shall be sorry that you worked so
+badly.'
+
+"Then away he goes to play with the bears, perhaps, in the forest. Now
+you can be quite sure that the dwarf has not kept that broken sword all
+these years without ever trying to mend it. He has tried many times,
+and he can no more put the pieces together than he can look as handsome
+as the fiery youth who has just left him here frightened half to death.
+So he simply sits down and lets himself get more frightened till he
+looks up and finds that he has a visitor.
+
+"The visitor is a tall old man whom he does not know, but I know him;
+he is the Father of the Gods. He asks the dwarf to let him sit down and
+rest, but the dwarf is even more ill-natured than usual and bids him go
+away and not trouble him. The Father of the Gods replies that he might
+perhaps tell the dwarf something that would be of use to him if he
+would let him stay. Now you see what a good chance this would be for
+the dwarf to ask how to mend the broken sword, but he is so cross and
+surly that he thinks of nothing but how to be as disagreeable as
+possible, so he says that he knows all that he needs to know and does
+not care to learn from anybody. But the Father of the Gods persists; he
+will give the dwarf his head, he says, if he cannot answer any three
+questions that he may ask him. This pleases the dwarf, for he thinks it
+would be a pleasure to him to cut off somebody's head. 'What people,
+then,' he asks for his first question, 'live under the ground?'
+
+"'The dwarfs,' says the stranger; 'one of them had a ring once, by
+which he ruled all the others.'
+
+"'And what people,' asks the dwarf, 'live upon the mountains?'
+
+"'The giants; one of them, in the form of a dragon, has the ring now.'
+
+"'And who live up among the clouds?'
+
+"'The gods,' says the stranger, 'and the Father of the Gods has a spear
+with which he rules the world.'
+
+"As he says that, he lets the end of the spear which he carries drop
+upon the ground and instantly there is a peal of thunder.
+
+"'Now,' says the stranger, 'as I have saved my head, you must pledge me
+yours to answer the three questions which I shall ask. Who is the
+strongest of heroes whom the Father of the Gods loves?'
+
+"The dwarf answers that he thinks it must be the son of the woman who
+died long ago in the forest, who will kill the dragon and win the
+treasure. This is a good answer, and the stranger asks again: 'What
+sword must he use to kill the dragon?'
+
+"What easy questions these are, to be sure! The dwarf says at once:
+'The magic sword that the Father of the Gods made.'
+
+"Now the stranger looks stern and says: 'But who shall mend the sword
+that it may be fit for the fight?'
+
+"At this the dwarf is frightened indeed. He cries out in terror that he
+cannot do it, he knows no better smith than himself, and he does not
+see how it can be done. 'Then you should have asked me that,' says the
+stranger, 'instead of foolish questions about things that you knew
+already. Yet I will tell you: as none but the best of heroes could pull
+that sword out of the tree where it once stuck, so now none but a hero
+who knows no fear can put its broken pieces together. Your poor head,
+which belongs to me, I will leave to the same hero, and so good-by.'
+
+"The dwarf falls upon the ground in a trembling heap, and so the young
+man finds him when he comes back to ask if he has yet mended the sword.
+'I can never mend it,' he cries. 'Have you ever known fear?'
+
+"'Fear?' he answers; 'no, what is fear? Is it something I ought to know
+how to do, something you ought to have taught me and have not? Is it a
+pleasant thing to have or to know or to do? What is it like?'
+
+"'I cannot teach you fear,' says the dwarf, 'but I know one who can, or
+else you never can learn it. It is the dragon that lives in the cave at
+the end of the wood. I will take you to him and if he will not teach
+you fear then you may kill him.'
+
+"'Very well,' says the young man, 'I will go; but first mend the sword
+for me; I shall need it.'
+
+"'I cannot mend it for you.' the dwarf answers; 'only one who does not
+know how to fear can do that.'
+
+"'Then I must do it myself,' says the young man, and he sets about it
+at once.
+
+"The fire on that forge has never been so hot and the fire here on our
+hearth has never been so bright as now when the young man who knows no
+fear blows the bellows. While the coals under that eager blast shine
+redder and redder and then whiter and whiter he begins filing the
+pieces of the sword to powder. The dwarf cries out to him that that is
+not the way to mend a sword; but this is not a common sword, and the
+dwarf has shown well enough already that he knows nothing about mending
+it. So the young smith pays no attention to him, but goes on with his
+work. In mending magic swords, just as in some other things, knowing
+how at the start does not count for so much as not knowing any fear.
+
+"So without any fear the young man melts the filings of the sword with
+the splendid fire which you can surely see just as well as anybody, and
+pours the melted metal into a mould of the shape of a sword blade. By
+this time the dwarf has found that it is of no use to interrupt him and
+has begun to think about his own work. When the dragon has been killed,
+he thinks, the hero will be hot and tired, and then he will offer him
+something to drink. It will be poison, the hero will die, and then he,
+the poor dwarf, who has worked and waited all these years for this day,
+will have all the treasure, with the magic helmet and the ring. So he
+sets himself to brewing the poison by the very same fire that the young
+man is using to forge his sword.
+
+"And now the young man has heated the sword again and shaped it with
+hammers and cooled it with water, he is sharpening and polishing the
+blade and fitting it to the hilt, and now at last he holds it in his
+hand and it is done. He has forged the magic sword and has proved his
+right; he is the true hero, the hero who knows no fear. And is there
+any thing that such a hero loves better than a good sword? Yes, to be
+sure; but to this hero the time for that has not come yet, and he has
+never felt such delight as fills him now when he looks along the
+bright, smooth, keen edge of this blade. Oh, the sword was not like
+this before it was broken. Sometimes people say that beautiful polished
+things are like mirrors, but this sword is like a flame. It burns and
+twinkles as he holds it and turns it in his hand. I can scarcely see of
+what shape it is, for now it shines like a straight beam of light, now,
+as he twists it, there is a flash in a half circle, like a scymitar,
+and again the point alone gleams out and flashes, as if it would find
+its own way to the heart of a foe, with no hand to guide it. He swings
+the sword above his head, as he did the other that the dwarf made for
+him, and strikes it upon the anvil. And this time the anvil falls in
+two as if it were made of paper, and the sword glitters and shines and
+shimmers in the joy of its magic sharpness and strength.
+
+"Now that the sword is ready, the dwarf leads the young man away
+through the woods, a long journey, to a place where he has never been
+before, to find the dragon. You see that deep, dark hole under the
+sticks; that is the dragon's cave in the side of the mountain. Just a
+little light shines at the very bottom of it, where the dragon is
+resting and breathing out fire. 'There is his hole,' says the dwarf;
+'just wait here till he comes out and then kill him, Look out for his
+teeth or he will catch you and eat you; be careful about his breath,
+for it is fiery and poisonous; beware of his tail, for he may wind it
+around you and crush you.'
+
+"'I do not care for his teeth or his breath or his tail,' says the
+young man; 'I only want to find his heart. Leave me here, and never let
+me see you again.'
+
+"The dwarf goes away and the young man sits down on the grass to wait
+for the dragon. You see, since he knows nothing at all about fear it
+does not seem to him such a great thing to kill a dragon. He does not
+care much whether he kills it or not, and he is in no hurry about it.
+So he sits on the grass and looks at the gray old rocks and the bright
+young flowers about him, sees the golden sunlight falling in little
+spots and flecks through the branches, feels the cool, fresh morning
+air, and hears the soft rustle of the trees and the singing of the
+birds. Most of all, he listens to the birds that flutter about in the
+branches above him, as the sparks hover over the fire there, before
+they fly away up the chimney, and in particular to one bird, right over
+his head in the tree. It sings so loudly and so clearly that it seems
+to be talking to him, only, of course, he cannot understand what it
+says. He has wished for a long time that he might have some better
+company than the ugly dwarf, and he thinks now that he should like to
+talk with the bird.
+
+"If he cannot understand the bird, perhaps the next best thing would be
+to make the bird understand him, so he makes a pipe out of a reed and
+tries to play upon it something like the bird's song. I don't know what
+he thinks he is saying to the bird with his reed, and he seems not much
+pleased with it himself, for he throws it away and blows a ringing,
+echoing blast on his horn instead. And now he gets an answer, for this
+time he has awakened the dragon, and it comes out of its cave to see
+what is making so much noise so early in the morning.
+
+"Oh, but it is an ugly-looking monster! It is something like a snake,
+but more like a giant lizard. It has scales all over its body and it
+has a long, shiny tail. It walks clumsily, because its legs are too
+small for it, and writhes and wriggles itself along, raising its head
+now and then to look about, and breathing out red fire and black smoke
+like a blast from a furnace. When its poisonous breath has blown this
+smoke away for an instant, it shows two rows of teeth like knives and a
+long forked tongue like a snake's, and its jaws are opened wide enough
+to take the young man into them and bite him into a dozen pieces at one
+snap. Surely if he is ever to learn what fear is now is his chance.
+
+"He sees all this just as plainly as I see it here in the fire; but do
+you think he is afraid? Why, he simply laughs at the monster. 'A
+pleasant-looking fellow you are,' he says; 'can you teach me what fear
+is? If you cannot, I shall prick you with my sword to make you think
+about it.'
+
+"Now, this dragon can talk just as well as it could when it was a
+giant, so it begins to get angry and tells the impudent young man to
+come on and see what he can do with his little tailor's needle of a
+sword. He does not have to be asked twice, and in a minute there is
+just as lively a fight as you ever saw. The dragon tries to breathe
+fire upon the hero and scorch him up to a black cinder, but he does not
+want to be a cinder and he runs around to the dragon's side. Then the
+dragon tries to catch him with its long slimy tail, so that it may
+crush him to a jelly, but he does not want to be a jelly either, so as
+soon as the tail comes near enough he gives it a terrible wound with
+his sword, and then runs back in front of the dragon. The monster gives
+a dreadful roar as it feels the wound, and raises its head and breast
+high up in the air, striking at the hero with its long, sharp claws and
+trying to throw the whole weight of its body upon him. This is just
+what he has been watching for, and as the dragon lifts itself before
+him he drives his sword clear through its heart.
+
+"Then he springs lightly away again, as the dragon, with another
+horrible bellow, falls down and rolls over upon its side. 'It is the
+curse of the ring that has killed me,' says the dragon, as it dies; 'my
+treasure is there in the cave; you can take it now, bold boy, but the
+curse of the ring will bring death to you, as it has brought it to me.'
+
+"So the dragon lies dead. The young hero seizes the hilt of the sword
+to draw it from the dragon's body, and as he pulls it out the blood
+from the wound spurts upon his hand. It burns as if it were the fuel of
+the creature's fiery breath. As he feels its heat he puts his fingers
+into his mouth, and the instant that he tastes the blood the most
+wonderful thing of all happens to him. He understands the songs of the
+birds. The one that he tried to talk with before sings to him again,
+and now he knows every word. It tells him that in the cave are gold and
+jewels untold, that with the magic helmet he can do wonderful things,
+and that with the magic ring he can rule the world. He thanks the bird
+for telling him such good things, and goes to find the helmet and the
+ring. In a minute he comes back with them; he does not want the rest of
+the treasure, for he knows nothing about gold and cares nothing about
+it.
+
+"Now the bird sings to him again. 'Beware of the dwarf,' it says, 'he
+means to do you harm. But when he speaks to you the blood of the dragon
+which you have tasted will help you to understand the meaning that is
+in his heart instead of the words that he says.'
+
+"So the dwarf comes back, with a drinking-horn in which he has poured
+the poison, and he offers it to the hero to drink. But with all the
+friendly words that he tries to speak, he can hide nothing from the
+young man, who reads his heart and knows that he has kept him and fed
+him all these years only that he might kill the dragon, and that now he
+means to poison him and get the gold for himself. There is only one
+thing to be done with such wickedness as this. He raises his sword and
+with one blow strikes the dwarf dead.
+
+"You can guess how the bird is delighted at this. It sings to him
+again: 'I know where you could find the loveliest woman in the world.
+There is fire burning all around her, and if you could only pass
+through that you could win her for your wife.'
+
+"'But could I pass through the fire?' he asks.
+
+"'Only the hero who knows no fear can do that,' sings the bird.
+
+"'Very well, then, I know no fear,' he answers; 'the dragon could not
+teach it to me; lead me to this woman; perhaps I may learn it from
+her.'
+
+"The bird flutters down a little from the tree and then flies away. Did
+you see the big, bright spark that flew up the chimney?
+
+"Away runs the hero too, following the bird. It is a long journey,
+through the forest and over the rocks and the mountains, but he is
+young and eager, and his light heart makes the way almost as easy for
+him as it is for the bird. Yet the bird is the faster, and by and by it
+flies so far ahead that he cannot see it at all, and then his way is
+barred by a mighty form that stands before him. It is the Father of the
+Gods. The young man does not know what a terrible person he has met,
+though it is fair to say that if he did know he would not care, and he
+asks him if he knows where he may find the beautiful woman with the
+fire all about her.
+
+"The Father of the Gods asks him in turn how he heard of this woman,
+what taught him to understand the song of the bird, who forged the
+sword with which he killed the dragon. All these things he answers, and
+the Father of the Gods is sure that the hero who knows no fear has come
+at last. Yet one test remains for him. 'There is the place you seek,'
+he says, as he points to the mountain-top, where the bright flames are
+whirling and dancing and leaping up into the very sky, 'there is your
+way, yet not another step upon it shall you go.' and he stretches his
+spear across the path to keep the young man back.
+
+"Ah, once before that spear was raised against this magic sword. It was
+a mighty arm that swung the sword then, the arm of the best of heroes
+living, but the hero had done a wrong, he had helped to break a
+promise, and he who breaks promises can never break the spears of the
+gods. His arm had not the young strength of that which masters the
+sword to-day. Fierce and brave and noble was he, yet he had seen many
+sorrows, and he knew what fear was; the glad, free hope of the new hero
+was not his. The sword then was true of temper, bright and sharp, but
+the heat and the light of the fire of a new manhood had not been forged
+into it then, and it was not aflame with the glory of youth and the
+promise of love. And so, with a sweep and a flash as of lightning, the
+magic sword cuts through the spear that no other sword ever dared even
+strike, and as the fragments fall upon the ground, the mountain shakes
+and shudders, and the thunder rolls and rumbles about its top. The
+young man is again upon his way. Half sadly and half gladly, the Father
+of the Gods looks after him. He has come and has passed, the hero who
+knows no fear; he has not even feared the spear that ruled the world,
+and now that spear is broken. The time of the gods is near.
+
+"Again I see the whole fire streaming up fiercely and joyously, as it
+did when the Father of the Gods kissed his daughter to sleep. The winds
+are still hushed around the mountain top, the flowers in the grass and
+on the rock still droop with folded petals, and the horse still sleeps
+upon the ground, for there, in the midst of the fire, on the bank of
+moss still lies the Daughter of the God, her form covered with her
+shield, and her face hidden by her closed helmet. Through all these
+years nothing has changed or stirred in this magic circle except the
+changing, stirring, restless, watchful fire that rings it around. Now,
+the time for life has come again. Up from the mountain side comes a
+ringing horn note, and in a moment the hero strides through the flames
+that dart and flicker and lick at him, but cannot harm him, and stands
+in the magic circle gazing in wonder upon its strange sleep.
+
+"'Who is that,' he thinks, 'covered with the shield? It must be a
+knight, but is it not hard for him to lie there all dressed in armor?'
+He gently takes off the helmet and starts back in surprise as he sees
+the lovely face and the soft spun gold that falls out upon the moss as
+he lifts the helmet away. Now he raises the shield and tries to open
+the armor in front, that the knight may breathe more freely. He cannot
+unfasten it, and at last he cuts it with his sword, and then he starts
+again as he sees the light, snowy folds of the garment underneath. This
+can be no knight, this is a woman. What has he done? What shall he do?
+He stands and looks at her; he has never seen anything half so
+beautiful, and as he looks he trembles; he fears to wake her and he
+fears to leave her asleep. Yes, the hero who knew no fear trembles. He
+has learned to fear from this woman. Not by anything that she has done
+has she taught him, for she still sleeps. It is only because she is a
+woman that he fears. He is no less a hero for that. A man who lived
+long and never feared at all would be no hero. The time has come to
+him, as it must come to every man, when it is braver to fear.
+
+"Yet, though he fears, he does not hesitate. He does just the only
+thing that he possibly could do. He kneels beside her and kisses her
+lips. Then she awakes. She opens those eyes that are blue with the
+depth of the sea and the light of the sky. She gazes around her at the
+rocks, at the trees, at the sunlight, at her hero, and her face is
+filled with joy. And what a face it is! No longer as it was before. At
+her father's kiss the goddess slept; her hero's kiss awoke the woman.
+Her face is as clear, as pure, and as radiant as before, but soft and
+gracious and gentle; her eyes are as full of light as they were, but
+there is tenderness in them too; her lips are as calm and beautiful,
+but they are all sweetness; what was still and stern and placid is full
+of sympathy, kind, and loving.
+
+"The flowers lift up their heads and open to look at her; the horse
+neighs to say that he is awake again and knows her; the little winds
+come back and murmur softly at first among the leaves; then they get
+bolder and kiss her cheek and lift her hair and shake it out to the
+light, and whisper to her hero and ask him if he saw any gold like that
+in the dragon's cave. He has never seen any woman before, yet he knows
+that in all the world there cannot be another such as this. She has
+seen many heroes, yet this is he for whom she has waited so long. Each
+knows all the depth of the other's thoughts, and so they stand and gaze
+each into the other's eyes and into the other's heart."
+
+"And is that all?" said the child. "It ends just like 'The Sleeping
+Beauty,' doesn't it?"
+
+"No; just here it is like 'The Sleeping Beauty,' but we shall see more
+some other time. This is the end for the night."
+
+
+
+
+THE END OF THE RING
+
+
+The fire has always fascinated and charmed me. When I was a child
+myself I used to watch it till my eyes ached, and my habit of throwing
+sticks and paper into it to see them burn was a terror to all my aunts.
+A bonfire was a delicious joy, and fireworks, especially if I could set
+them off myself, were the summit of happiness. Even now, whenever I see
+a house on fire I am afraid my pleasure in watching it is much greater
+than my sorrow for the people who are losing their property or their
+home. I do not want houses to burn, but if they must burn I want to see
+them. As for the fire on the hearth, that is my counsellor and friend.
+When we are alone together I sit and gaze into it, and it tells me of
+old, happy times, of other friends who are far away now, and of the
+pleasant nights we had together. It speaks to me of old hopes, it is
+glad with me in their fulfilment or it cheers me in their loss. It
+talks of bright, new hopes, and tells me that even if all else fails,
+it will still be true to me and will try, if I will come back to it, to
+cheer and help me again as it cheers and helps me now.
+
+As I sat in this way with the fire, the little girl came and took a low
+stool beside me. She looked into the fire too, laying her cheek upon my
+hand, which rested on the arm of the chair. She does not care for our
+talks about other hearth fires that long ago went out, so we had to do
+something else to entertain her. "Did you want to know more about the
+Daughter of the God and the Hero who knew no fear?" I said. "Well, I
+can see them both now, just where we saw them last on the mountain top,
+with the fire burning around them as it did before, but not so high and
+fierce as before, because it is not needed for a guard so much as it
+was.
+
+"The Daughter of the God is telling her hero that he ought to go to
+seek more adventures. Perhaps he may find other things for his magic
+sword to kill besides dragons and wicked dwarfs, and the more such
+things he does the better she will love him when he comes back. Oh, she
+knows all about heroes and what they ought to do. He does not like to
+leave her at all, but if he knows that she really wants him to seek
+adventures, you may be sure he will seek them. Before he goes, he gives
+her the ring that he got from the dragon's cave, with the curse upon
+it, but they are not the sort of man and woman to trouble themselves
+about curses. In return she gives him her horse and her shield, not
+that he will need it much against his enemies, with that magic sword,
+and besides she knows how to cast a spell upon him so that he cannot be
+wounded in battle; but the shield may keep off the rain, if he has to
+sleep out of doors. So he goes away down the mountain and she waits for
+him to come back.
+
+"Now all the fire changes to a shining river. It is the same river
+where the treasure was once kept by the nymphs, only now we are above
+it instead of under it. On the bank is the hall of a king and I see the
+king himself sitting on his throne, with his sister, a beautiful
+princess, beside him. With them too is their half-brother. He is a
+strange fellow and you ought to know him. His father is the dwarf who
+stole the treasure, and his father has told him all about it many times
+and has taught him to hope that some time he may get it again, so that
+they two may divide all the riches between them, and with the ring and
+the helmet may rule the world. He is just as wicked as his father, all
+he cares for in the world is to get that treasure, and you may be sure
+that he will try to get it in every way that he can find, good or bad.
+
+"He is trying at this very moment, and in rather a strange way, you may
+think at first. He is telling the king that he ought to have a wife,
+and that his sister ought to have a husband. The king asks, just as
+everybody always asks when he is told that, 'Whom do you want me to
+have?'
+
+"'The most beautiful and the most royal of all women,' says the half-
+brother, 'lives upon a rock with fire all around it for a guard, and
+whoever shall break through the fire and come to her shall win her for
+his wife.'
+
+"This does not encourage the king at all. He never walked through a
+fire or did anything of the sort, and he does not even care to try. You
+see the difference between a king and a hero. But the half-brother says
+that he knows of a hero who would be glad to go through the fire and
+get this woman for the king, if only he might have the king's sister
+for himself. The princess is not displeased at all at the notion of a
+husband who is so brave and can do such wonderful things, but she fears
+that such a hero must long ago have seen and loved some woman more
+beautiful than she, and that he will not care for her at all. But the
+half-brother answers: 'There is a magic drink which you shall give him,
+and it will make him forget any other woman he has ever seen, no matter
+who she is.'
+
+"The half-brother knows very well, I believe, that the hero already
+loves the Daughter of the God, and it is she that he means to make him
+forget before he sends him to get her for the king. Of course the king
+and his sister know nothing about this, or they would have nothing to
+do with such a wicked plan, for they are reasonably good people. The
+half-brother says that the hero is going about the world to find
+adventures and is sure to come here before long, and true enough, even
+while he is speaking they see him coming with his horse in a little
+boat on the river. They call to him to come on shore, and they welcome
+him as if they were never so glad to see anybody before in their lives.
+
+"Perhaps, indeed, they never were so glad to see anybody, and I am sure
+the princess never was. A form so full of life and action and vigor, or
+a face so full of freedom and courage and cheer surely she has never
+seen. The fine frankness of his ways and the young grace of his motion
+are new to her too, and that she can hope to win him at once for
+herself is almost more than she can believe. She would not think of
+such a thing at all if she knew how little he thought or cared about
+her. He is charming and polite enough, of course, but as often as he
+thinks of her or of anything else once he thinks of the Daughter of the
+God twice, and when his thoughts are not especially drawn away he
+thinks of her all the time. But now the princess offers him a horn
+filled with the magic drink that is to make him forget. Oh, if only
+that clever little bird were here now to warn him, as it did when the
+dwarf mixed the drink for him, how much trouble might be saved! But,
+you know, he never thinks of danger, so he drinks, and then he thinks
+of nothing at all--nothing at all but the princess.
+
+"Well, that is not surprising, for you know she is only the second
+woman he ever saw and he has forgotten the first. You would scarcely
+believe how much he has forgotten her. Why, if the king were to tell
+him at this moment that a woman slept under a shield, guarded by fire,
+that a young man came through the fire, cut open her armor, kissed her,
+awakened her, and vowed that he would love her forever, he would not
+remember that he had ever known of anything of the kind or had ever
+heard of such a young man. For him there is no woman in the world now
+but the princess.
+
+"The king does tell him a little of this story, when the hero asks him,
+still thinking of the princess, whether he has a wife as well a sister.
+'No,' the king answers, 'I have no wife. The woman I want for my wife I
+fear I never can win; she is far away upon a mountain and a fire burns
+all around her. He who could pass through the fire and come to her
+might win her, but I could never do it.'
+
+"It is just as I told you. This absurd young man does not know that he
+ever heard of a woman in the middle of a fire before; he does not know
+that he ever learned to fear, so he says: 'I am not afraid of a little
+fire; I will go and get your bride for you if you will give me your
+sister for mine.'
+
+"'I will give you my sister gladly,' says the king; 'but how is my
+bride to be made to think that it is I who come to her and win her,
+instead of you?'
+
+"'That is easy,' says the half-brother; 'with that helmet which he
+wears he can take any form he will, and he can make himself look
+exactly like you. He shall bring the woman away through the fire and
+then he shall leave her to you, and she will never know that it was not
+you who came to her rock.'
+
+"Now, the hero, you know, never knew what could be done with that
+helmet. He only took it with him from the dragon's cave because the
+little bird told him it was good for something. Now that he has learned
+its use everything that he and the king want to do seems simple enough,
+and they set off in the little boat for the rock with the fire around
+it. The half-brother stays on the shore and looks after them, with his
+pale face and his wicked eyes. The woman far away on that rock has the
+magic ring. When the king brings her here as his bride he will find
+some way to get the ring, and then what will he care for kings or
+brides, for princesses or heroes? He and the wicked dwarf, his father,
+will rule the world.
+
+"The fire burns up high and clear again and within its circle sits the
+Daughter of the God. She does not sleep now; she sits and gazes at the
+ring her hero gave her, thinking nothing of the curse upon it, and
+wonders when he will come back to her. Ah, when will her hero come back
+to her? Do you remember how once on this very rock the daughters of the
+god met to ride together to his castle, and how they came each riding
+on her flying horse, racing with the driving wind and the hurrying
+clouds? With just such a leap and a flash of a sudden flame up into the
+smoke I can see one of them riding now. So quickly she gallops through
+the sky that I can scarcely see what she is till she reaches the rock,
+springs from her horse, and stands before her sister. Her sister runs
+to meet her and to ask if their father is still angry with her.
+
+"The war goddess has sad things to tell of their father. He sits in his
+castle with the gods and his heroes around him. They do not go out to
+fight and kill each other, and to be made alive and well again at
+sunset any more. The Father of the Gods only sits there and looks at
+his broken spear, and the rest, full of dread, look only at him. He is
+weary of ruling the world, weary of all the trouble that has come from
+the wrong that he did in not giving that treasure back to the river
+nymphs. He is not sorry that his spear is broken and he would gladly
+hasten the end of all. He has made his heroes cut down the great ash
+tree from which his spear was made, the tree that spread its branches
+over all his castle, and they have piled the wood high around the
+walls. When the end comes it will help the castle to burn. And now the
+Father of the Gods says that, if the woman who has the magic ring whose
+curse has been so heavy would but give it back to the river nymphs, all
+his great sorrows would be over.
+
+"This his daughter, the war goddess, heard, and hastened here to tell
+it to his daughter, the woman. Will she give up the ring? Will she help
+the gods to find the rest that they long for? Ah, but a war goddess
+knows as little of women as she does of men. No, no, the woman loves
+the man who gave her the ring and she would not lose it for a moment to
+gain ages of peace for the gods whose homes she shares no more. She
+cares nothing for weary gods; she has a hero. The war goddess cannot
+understand her sister. She leaves her and is away again, toward the
+castle of the gods, riding on her flying horse, galloping against the
+driving wind and the hurrying clouds.
+
+"A horn sounds down in the valley. There is only one horn in the world
+like that, and the woman springs joyfully up to meet her hero. He comes
+and walks through the fire as he did before, but oh! how different he
+is from what he was before! Then his face was young and fresh and noble
+and his form was graceful and light; now his face and his form are
+those of the king. Is this the promise that the Father of the Gods made
+to his daughter? He said that none should ever come to her or win her
+but the bravest of heroes. Yes, this is indeed the promise and this the
+hero, but how sadly for her the promise is kept! When he saw her before
+he gently lifted off her helmet and kissed her and learned to fear
+before her; now he thinks only of the princess, away there by the
+river, and he tells the Daughter of the God that he is the king and
+that she must come with him and be his bride.
+
+"She resists him, and he seizes her to force her. She holds out her
+hand to him with the ring and bids him beware its power, which will
+protect her from him; he seizes her hand and pulls the ring from her
+finger. She is helpless; she faints in his grasp; he carries her
+through the fire and down the mountain to where the real king is. He
+leaves them together and goes back alone to the hall by the river and
+to the princess.
+
+"Very glad is the princess, you may be sure, to see him come back so
+quickly and so safely, and glad too is the half-brother, but for a
+different reason, for he sees the ring on his finger. Now they call all
+the people together to greet the king and his bride as they come in
+their boat on the river. There are shouts and cheers, and men with
+waving banners and women who scatter flowers; the king smiles upon his
+people and thanks them for their greeting, and there is only one who is
+not merry and glad. And whom do you think the king's new bride sees in
+all this happy crowd? Only her hero, in his own form again, and, if her
+heart was wounded and sad before, it dies within her now, when she sees
+him leading the princess out to meet them and knows that he thinks no
+longer of her. She turns pale and faint at first and then angry and
+fierce. She cries out that this man was her lover, that he has betrayed
+her for the princess and that he has betrayed the king too.
+
+"Of course, nobody can understand that at all--nobody but the half-
+brother--but you can think how everybody must be shocked and
+astonished, and how everybody tries to make out what she means, and
+fails. To be sure, she understands it herself as little as the rest.
+She knows nothing about the magic drink that made her lover forget her;
+she knows only that he swore always to love her and that now he loves
+the princess. The king does not know that the hero ever saw his bride
+till he went to her mountain to bring her for him, so he supposes that,
+if he ever told her that he loved her, it must have been then; that
+would be betraying the king, his friend, in a most cruel way, of
+course. The princess knows only just what the king knows, and if the
+king has been deceived and betrayed, she must have been deceived and
+betrayed a great deal more. As for the poor hero himself, he does not
+remember that he ever saw this woman before, he does not know how he
+can have done any wrong, and he is more puzzled than any of the rest.
+Only the half-brother knows all about it, that nobody is to blame at
+all except himself, and it is he whom nobody thinks of suspecting. The
+hero lays his hand on the half-brother's spear and swears that he has
+never wronged anyone here; if he has, he says, may this very spear slay
+him.
+
+"Now is the time for the half-brother to work the hero's ruin and to
+try to get the ring that he wears. When all have gone but him and the
+king and his bride, he whispers to her that he will help her, and will
+kill the hero to revenge the wrong that he has done her. 'You kill
+him!' she cries. 'If he once looked at you, you would not dare come
+near him.'
+
+"'Yet,' he says, 'there must be some way that I could do it; tell me
+what it is and you will be revenged.'
+
+"'I cast a spell upon him,' she says, 'so that he could not be wounded
+in battle, but I knew that he would never turn his back upon an enemy,
+so I set no spell there; you may strike him in the back.'
+
+"Now, he tells the king that nothing but the hero's death can restore
+the honor that he has lost. 'To-morrow,' he says, 'we will go hunting;
+I will kill him with my spear, and we will tell the princess that it
+was a wild boar that did it.'
+
+"'It shall be so,' they all cry; 'he must die.'
+
+"And whom do you think I see now? The river nymphs again. Not before
+the king's house, where we have been so long, but in another part of
+the river, all shut in by wild woods and rocks. They are swimming and
+playing on the water, just as they did under it when we saw them first,
+and they seem just as careless and happy as they did then, but they are
+still mourning for their lost treasure and longing to get it back
+again. If they could only get the ring it would do as well as the whole
+treasure, for the ring is the magic part of it. And now to this very
+spot comes the hero, who wears the ring on his finger. He has wandered
+away from the king and his men, who were hunting with him, and as soon
+as the nymphs see him they beg him to give them back their ring.
+
+"He says that he will not, at first; it was too much trouble for him to
+win it from the dragon. But he really does not care so very much about
+it, and I think he would let them have it in the end if it were not for
+a great mistake that they make in asking for it. They tell him about
+the curse of the ring, and that if he keeps it he will be killed this
+very day. Now, you can see easily enough that that is the very worst
+thing they could say if they hoped to get the ring from him, for he is
+not in the least afraid of being killed, and he will not have anybody
+believe that he is afraid. They shall not have it, he says, happen what
+will. They will have it, they call back to him, and this very day; and
+so they dive down under the water and leave him.
+
+"Now come the rest of the huntsmen and sit about in a circle to rest
+here in the shade and to talk. The king is gloomy, thinking still of
+the wrongs that have been done him. His half-brother asks the hero if
+it is true that he knows what the birds say. 'I listen to them no
+more,' he answers; 'but to cheer the king I will tell you some stories
+of the things that I have seen and the things that I have done.'
+
+"He tells them of the dwarf who kept him and brought him up that he
+might fight the dragon; he tells how he mended the magic sword, how he
+killed the dragon with it, and took the helmet and the ring from the
+cave. A bird then sang to him, he says, and told him that the dwarf
+would try to kill him, but he killed the dwarf instead. Here he stops,
+for he cannot remember anything about the mountain top with the fire
+around it, or the Daughter of the God, or even what the bird sang to
+him next. But the king's half-brother squeezes something into his wine
+and tells him to drink it and it will make him remember better.
+
+"He drinks, and it does make him remember better. He tells of the
+lovely woman who slept with the fire all around her, and how he kissed
+her and awoke her. Then suddenly the king understands it all; he
+remembers the drink of forgetfulness that they gave the hero, and he
+knows that nobody has done any wrong but his wicked half-brother; he it
+was who told him of the woman in the fire who should be his wife, he
+who said that the hero should bring her to him, he who bade them give
+him the drink to make him forget, he who first said that the hero must
+die. The king would gladly save the hero now, but it is too late.
+
+"It is too late, for of a sudden two ravens fly up from beside the
+river and away over the heads of them all. They are the ravens that fly
+all over the world and then to the Father of the Gods, to tell him all
+that they see and all that they hear. They are going now to tell him
+that the end of the gods, the end that he longs for, is near. The hero
+starts up to hear what they say. He turns his back to the others, and
+the half-brother, before the king can stop him, thrusts his spear into
+his back. The hero turns for an instant to rush against the murderer,
+but his strength is gone, and he falls helpless upon the ground. All
+the rest cry out in horror, and the half-brother turns from them and
+strides away.
+
+"And what now of the hero? He speaks no word to those who stand about
+him as he lies here dying on the ground. Where are his thoughts now? He
+is thinking of the only time he ever feared. He is back again upon the
+rock, with the flames curling and whirling all around him. Before him
+once more lies the Daughter of the God. Again he kisses her lips. She
+awakes. He sees again those deep, blue, wonderful eyes. He does not see
+the rocks, or the trees, or the sunlight--only her. Again for one last
+moment he knows that in all the world there cannot be another woman
+such as this. They look each into the other's eyes and into the other's
+heart. He is dead.
+
+"They lay him on his shield and lift it upon their shoulders, and so
+they bear him back to the king's house by the river. The half-brother
+is there before them and tells the princess that her lover has been
+killed by a wild boar. She does not believe him, and when the others
+come she calls the king and all the rest his murderers. The king indeed
+wished his death once, but he is sorry enough for it now, and says that
+it was his half-brother alone who did it. 'Well, then,' cries the
+murderer, 'it was I, and now I will have my reward; I will take the
+ring.'
+
+"The king cries out that he shall not have it, and draws his sword. The
+half-brother draws his own and rushes upon him, and before the men can
+run between them the king too lies dead upon the ground. Then again the
+murderer turns toward the body of the hero to take the ring, but, as he
+comes near it, the hand that wears the ring rises of itself, as if it
+were not dead and would ward him off. He falls back in terror, and so
+do all the rest.
+
+"But now comes the Daughter of the God. She bids them all stand back
+from her hero. 'He was mine, not yours,' she says to the princess; 'he
+loved me and I loved him before you ever saw him.'
+
+"'Then it was all the fault of this wicked man who has murdered him,'
+the princess answers; 'he gave me the drink for him that made him
+forget you.'
+
+"She turns away from the hero and bends over the king, her brother. The
+Daughter of the God understands now; he was never faithless to her of
+himself. She tells the men to build a funeral pyre. They pile up the
+wood and the women scatter flowers upon it. Then she takes the ring
+from her hero's hand. While they lay his body on the pyre she bids them
+bring his horse, the horse that once was hers, that flew with her
+through the clouds when she was a goddess, and slept on the mountain
+top with the fire around it where she slept. With a torch she lights
+the pyre. See how the flames leap up and catch at the wood and stream
+and grow. Once more the ravens fly up from the river bank and away into
+the sky. Now the end for the gods comes indeed.
+
+"The Daughter of the God springs upon the horse and with one bound they
+leap into the middle of the flames. Yet, as soon as they are there,
+they are gone, nor can I see the hero there any more. The pyre all
+falls together; but in the middle of its hot, red embers I see
+something brighter than all the rest. It is the ring. The water of the
+river rises and rises till it flows over the fire and puts it out. Then
+on the surface, swimming and playing about as always, I see the river
+nymphs. They have found the ring, and their treasure is their own
+again. But the wicked half-brother of the king, the son of that dwarf
+who stole it at first long ago, tries one last time to gain it. He
+plunges into the river to seize it from the nymphs, but one of them
+holds it up high in her hand and swims away from him, and the others
+twine their arms around him and draw him down and down under the water
+and he is seen no more. The river sinks back to its old bed. The
+treasure that was stolen is restored. All the evil and the punishment
+that came from the curse of the ring is done."
+
+[Illustration: "THEIR TREASURE IS THEIR OWN AGAIN."]
+
+A big stick that had been burning brightly and steadily for a long time
+suddenly fell in two and the quick flames and the sparks sprang high up
+into the chimney. "See, it is the castle of the gods itself that is
+burning and lighting up all the sky. The wrong that they have done and
+the sorrow that they have suffered are past, and their end has come.
+But the fire burns fiercer still. It seizes upon everything, in the sky
+and on the earth. Perhaps it is better that it should. The world that
+we have seen in our fire here grew so selfish and cruel and bad after
+the gold was stolen from the river that it may be best for it to end in
+these flames. They will last for only a moment. Even now they are not
+so fierce. I can see the sky again. There is a beautiful brightness in
+it, like the coming of the morning; yet it is more than that, for it
+streams and flashes like the northern lights. I can see the earth again
+too, but it is not as it was before. It is a new world. It has all the
+beautiful things that the old one had, the green pastures and plains,
+the silver rivers, the blue mountains. Some of the gods have come back,
+but not those who did such wrong and made the old world so wicked. The
+God of Summer, who died long ago when the evil began, has come again;
+and if he and all who were good and beautiful before are to be here
+still, I am sure that the Daughter of the God and the hero who knew no
+fear must find their way here somehow. A new world that is to be all
+unselfish and brave and true needs such a woman and such a hero."
+
+
+
+
+THE KNIGHT OF THE SWAN
+
+
+The little girl was lying on the rug before the fire, one elbow buried
+in the long fur, and one cheek resting on her hand. She was gazing into
+the fire, studying the bright, flickering flames and the red embers. I
+had not noticed that she was there till her mother said, "You will ruin
+that child's eyes with your stories about the things in the fire. She
+would watch it half the day if I would let her; it is too bright and
+too hot to look at so long and so near. Come away, dear, and don't look
+at the fire again to-day."
+
+"But why can't I see such things as you see?" the child said to me,
+with a little sigh, as she got up slowly from the rug and came toward
+me.
+
+"Just because you have not quite learned how yet," I said; "now suppose
+you give up trying for a little while, because you might hurt your
+eyes, as your mother says, and let me look into the fire for you again.
+Sit here in the big chair with me; turn your face right away from the
+fire and lay it against my shoulder. Now shut your eyes. Some people
+can see a great deal better with their eyes shut, especially such
+things as we are trying to see, because when their eyes are open they
+see the every-day things all around them, and it confuses them and
+prevents their seeing what they want to see or what they ought to see.
+They are people who have not learned to look right through the every-
+day things and see others, in spite of them, that are much better and
+more beautiful, as you will learn to do some time. But just now keep
+your eyes shut.
+
+"I see then, first, a splendid company of knights and people. The
+shining of the fire is like the light of the sun, that glances from the
+polished armor, the gleaming weapons, the standards, and the banners of
+bright-colored silk and gold. It is all so fine that it looks like a
+holiday time; but it is not that, for the crowds of people seem bent on
+something more important than dancing and playing games. They are all
+looking toward the King, who stands under a great tree and seems to
+have something to say to them. The heralds are blowing their trumpets
+and calling to the people to come and hear what the King has to say,
+though they are all there already and are only too anxious to hear, and
+so the King speaks. He says that far away at the other end of the
+country there is danger. Enemies are coming against him and his people,
+and he calls upon all the men here about him to help him to guard the
+land.
+
+"Then they all shout and wave their banners and their arms, as I can
+see in the flickering of the bright little flames, and they all cry
+that they will fight for their King and their country. But this does
+not satisfy the King, for he says that since he has come here he finds
+everything going wrong and everybody quarrelling, and he asks what it
+all means. Now there comes forward a man who has all this while been
+standing silent beside his wife; and it may be as well to say just here
+that this man's wife is a wicked witch and that the man himself is none
+too good. So a part of what he tells the King is true and another good
+large part is not true at all. When he tells what the King knew before,
+he tells the truth; and when he tells anything that the King did not
+know before, it is generally a lie.
+
+"So he tells the King that he was left the guardian of the two children
+of the Duke who ruled in this part of the country, and who died a few
+years ago. One of the children was a girl and the other was a boy, and
+he tells the King, too, how he took care of them as they grew up. All
+this is true and the King knew all about it before. But now he goes on
+to say that one day, when the brother and the sister had gone away from
+their castle together, the sister came back alone, trembling and crying
+and saying that she had lost her brother. Probably this is true enough
+too, but when he says that the poor sister was not really sorry at all,
+because she had killed her brother herself, he is telling a dreadful,
+cruel lie. Still perhaps it is not so much his fault, for his wife, the
+witch, who you must remember is a good deal more wicked than himself,
+knows much more about it all than it would do for her to tell, and she
+may have deceived him as well as other people.
+
+"Of course the King is shocked at such a dreadful story as this, and he
+wants to know how the sister could ever have done anything so wicked.
+Well, of course the man who accuses her so boldly has a reason to give
+for what he says she did, or he never would have dared mention it at
+all. So he explains that the sister was to be married to him and that
+she refused him, and then he married the witch instead, only he does
+not call her a witch. He thinks that the sister must have had some
+other lover, and she must have thought that if her brother, who ought
+to be Duke as soon as he should be old enough, were only dead, she
+could be married to her lover, and then he would be the Duke. And now
+he says that he thinks he himself ought to be Duke, since there is
+nobody who deserves to be one better than he, and he asks the King to
+make him so. Now, of course anybody as bright as you are can see at
+once that the whole reason for all these wicked stories is just that he
+wants to be Duke; but kings and knights and crowds of people are not
+always very bright, though they may look so there in the fire, and they
+do not feel so sure about it as you or I would. So the quarrel lies
+between a rich and powerful man who is a soldier and once saved the
+King's life, with a wife who is a witch and knows all about magic, and
+one poor girl who knows nothing about magic and who has no friends who
+would dare to help her. For these people here about the King are a
+peculiar sort of people who shout very loud about justice and their own
+rights and others' rights, but seldom do anything unless they feel sure
+that they are on the side that is going to win. There are no such
+people nowadays, of course; but there were once.
+
+"But the King himself is a good king, and he means to be quite fair and
+just, and he calls for the sister to come before him and tell her own
+story. So the heralds blow their trumpets again and call for her, and
+she comes. She is dressed all in white, and she looks so beautiful and
+pale and sad that nobody who was not wicked himself could ever suspect
+her of doing anything wicked, and all the men about mutter that the one
+who says that she killed her brother will have to prove it. They have
+just heard the King say something of the kind, so they feel very
+righteous and very bold about it. The King, then, asks her if she can
+say anything about this dreadful accusation, and she tells him how
+often she has prayed for help, how, after she has prayed, she has
+fallen into a sweet sleep and has seen a knight in bright armor,
+leaning on his sword, and how he has comforted her. This knight, she
+says, shall be the one to fight for her and to protect her.
+
+"Now, of course, this is all very pretty, but it does not seem to have
+much to do with the question of whether she killed her poor little
+brother or not. Yet it does have something to do with it, and I will
+tell you how. A long time ago, hundreds of years, when people had
+quarrels, they did not hire lawyers to argue and plead and plot and
+contrive for them, but they just stood up together, if they were both
+strong men, and fought till one of them killed the other or showed that
+he could if he wanted to. And everybody who looked on felt perfectly
+sure that the one who was right could not possibly lose such a fight
+and the one who was wrong could not possibly win it. If one of the two
+who had the quarrel was a woman, some friend who trusted her enough to
+think that she was right would fight for her."
+
+"But what made the man who was wrong ever fight at all," the little
+girl asked, "if everybody believed that he was sure to get beaten?"
+
+"I have thought of that myself," I admitted, "and I think that it must
+have been for one of two reasons: either the bad people did not believe
+that the right was sure to win, or else the people who were wrong
+usually thought that they were really right. I believe that was the
+true reason, and it shows that bad people are not always quite so bad
+as we think, for they usually contrive in some way, I am sure, to make
+themselves believe they are right. And now, though all these things
+that I am telling you are things that I see right here in the fire, yet
+they are like things that must have happened long, long ago, and this
+very way of settling disagreements by a good hard fight is the way that
+the question of this poor girl's guilt or innocence must be settled.
+She probably knows this just as well as anybody, and that is what she
+means when she says that the knight she saw in her dream shall be the
+one to fight for her. But the accuser turns everything against her, as
+usual, and says: 'You see it is just as I said; she is talking about
+this lover of hers who she hopes will marry her and be Duke instead of
+her brother. Yet he says he is quite ready to fight anybody who wants
+to try it with him, and he invites any of the men standing about to
+come forward and fight for the poor, helpless girl, if he wants to. But
+they all say no, they should be very sorry to have to kill such a great
+man and so brave a soldier. The truth is, you see, they are all afraid
+that if they should fight they might get hurt, and why should they
+trouble themselves about this girl's rights or wrongs?
+
+"Still she says that the knight whom she saw in her dream shall be her
+champion, and if he will come now and help her in this need she will be
+his bride if he will take her, and he shall have all her father's lands
+and his crown, since her brother is dead. But nobody comes, and the
+people all begin to think that she must be guilty after all, and that,
+instead of the accuser having to prove that she is, she will have to
+prove that she is not, if she wants any sympathy from them, though why
+she should want it I hardly know. But the King still means to give her
+every chance, and he orders the heralds to blow their trumpets toward
+the north and the east and the south and the west, and to call upon
+anybody who will defend her straightway to appear. And the heralds blow
+their loud trumpets and the people gaze anxiously in all directions,
+but nobody comes to help her. And then she tells the King that her
+knight dwells far off and does not hear, and she begs him to call upon
+him again, and the heralds blow once more, and she prays that her
+knight may be sent to her, and now suddenly all the eyes of the crowd
+are turned one way, and all the people shout and point and gaze at
+something which they see away in the distance.
+
+"I can see it too, for there in the fire, back on the hearth, is a bed
+of bright embers that shines and glitters like a broad river under the
+sun of noon, and at the very farthest place is one little spot brighter
+than all the rest, and it seems to come nearer and nearer, and as it
+comes I begin to make out its wonderful shape. There is a little boat,
+and in it stands a knight, all in silver armor, and it is his armor
+that shines so. But the strangest thing of all is that a beautiful
+white swan, its wings almost as bright as the knight's armor, is
+drawing the boat along by a silver chain wound about its neck. It is
+this that makes the people gaze and point, and, while the swan and the
+boat are coming nearer, I will tell you more about the knight than he
+will be willing to tell about himself. Did you ever hear of the Holy
+Grail? It was the crystal cup, the old stories say, out of which the
+Saviour drank at the Last Supper, and afterward His blood was caught in
+it, as He hung upon the cross. Hundreds of years later it was kept in a
+beautiful temple which nobody ever knew how to find, except a few
+chosen knights, who guarded the Grail and did its bidding, for this cup
+seemed still to have the life of that blood in it, and it had ways of
+telling its knights what they must do. And so they were sometimes sent
+far away to fight for the right or to punish wrong, but wherever they
+went they never knew hunger or thirst or weariness, and they could
+never be killed or overcome in battle; but no one must ever ask one of
+these knights his name or his dwelling place, and, if anyone having the
+right should ask these questions, the knight must return to the temple
+of the Holy Grail. Now, seven days ago a bell in the temple rang, all
+of itself, meaning that help was needed somewhere. One of the knights
+put on his armor and called for his horse, and stood ready, but he knew
+not where he was to go or what he was to do, till a swan drawing a
+little boat came sailing along upon the river, and the knight said:
+'Take back the horse; I will go with the swan,' and so here is he come
+to see what help is wanted of him.
+
+"And now I see him step on shore, and the girl whom he has come to
+rescue knows him as the knight of her dream, and everybody is glad of
+his coming except the accuser and his wife, the witch, and she,
+strangely enough, seems a good deal more frightened at the sight of the
+swan than at that of the knight. Now the knight asks the young girl
+whether, if he will fight her battle and win it, she will promise never
+to ask him whence he comes or what he is, and she swears that she will
+always love him and trust him, and will do whatever he commands. So now
+the two knights, with all the people looking on and holding their
+breaths with anxiety, and the king watching that all may be done fairly
+and in order, draw their swords and stand against each other. But I see
+only one or two little flashes of the flames as the gleaming swords are
+whirled above their heads, and then the wicked accuser falls and the
+Knight of the Swan spares his life, while all the people shout and lift
+the knight above their heads on his shield, just as if they had known
+all along that the girl was innocent, and just as if they would not
+have shouted just as loud if the battle had gone the other way.
+
+[Illustration: "THE KNIGHT OF HER DREAM."]
+
+"The fire is going down a little and everything looks darker. It is
+night now. Here on one side is a church, all dark, and on the other
+side, where the light still shines, I can see the bright windows of the
+palace, where they are making preparations for a grand wedding
+tomorrow, and you can guess who are to be married. On the steps of the
+church, looking up at the palace windows and the lights that shine in
+them, are the witch and her husband. He is bemoaning his disgrace and
+accusing his wife of causing it all by telling him that the good sister
+had killed her brother. And this shows me, more than anything he has
+done before, how bad he is, and what a coward he is, because, when a
+man has tried to gain things that he knows are not his by ways that he
+knows are not right, he ought to take all the consequences, if he
+fails, like a man, and not snivel and say that a woman made him do it.
+But the witch says that there is a chance yet for them to be revenged,
+for, if only the Knight of the Swan can be made to tell who he is, he
+will have to go away as he came and be lost, and she believes she can
+find some way to tempt his bride to ask him the forbidden questions,
+and then he will have to answer.
+
+"Now the bride that is to be to-morrow comes out upon a balcony of the
+palace, and the witch, sending her husband away, calls to her and tells
+her how sorry they both are for all that they have done. No doubt they
+are very sorry indeed, as they ought to be. But the bride is so happy
+and so kind that she cannot bear to see anybody unhappy, so she says
+that she forgives them, and if she has injured them in any way she asks
+that they forgive her. That is absurd, of course. Then she lets the
+witch talk to her till the wicked woman says that she hopes the knight
+who came to her in such a strange way, that nobody can account for,
+will never deceive her, and that she will always live happily with him;
+and by this she means, of course, that she thinks that he will deceive
+her and that she will not be happy. But the bride says that she trusts
+her knight wholly, and she asks the witch to come in with her and rest
+for the night. And that is just the one thing she ought not to do, for
+here is what I hope you will see and remember more than anything else
+in all this: be as kind and as helpful and as compassionate as you can,
+always, but never help, never listen to, never allow to be near you a
+man or a woman who says one word against anyone you love. Put no trust
+in anyone till you know that trust is safe, and, when you once know,
+never hear of one breath of doubt again.
+
+"The fire burns higher and brighter, and the morning is coming. The
+square grows light and fills with people. Now come the heralds again,
+and they sound their trumpets and proclaim that the Knight of the Swan
+is to have the crown of his bride's father, and is to be called
+Guardian instead of Duke, that the accuser of his bride is an outcast
+and must be shunned by all men, and finally that everybody to-day is to
+come to the marriage, but that to-morrow all the men must go to the
+defence of the King and the country. And now, with all its sparkle and
+glitter, comes the procession, leading the bride to the church, when,
+just as she is at the door, right before her stands the witch, full of
+anger and pride, and cries aloud that it is her place to go before this
+woman, and no one shall keep her from the place that is hers, and she
+taunts the bride with not knowing who or what her knight is; and so a
+great clamor arises among the people, and in the midst of it come the
+King and the Knight of the Swan and their train. The witch's wicked
+husband comes, too, and calls out that the knight beat him yesterday by
+magic and not by honest fighting, and he demands that the King ask the
+knight who he is. But he and his wife are put aside, and the procession
+goes into the church, and as I look into the church itself now the
+whole of the fire is a blaze of candles on the altar. Now turn your
+face away from the fire as it was before and shut your eyes again.
+There is no more to be seen in this wedding than there was in the
+battle of the two knights, and all that there is I will tell you.
+
+"The light of the candles on the altar changes to a blaze of wedding
+torches, and the King and the knights and the ladies are leading the
+bride and the bridegroom to their chamber. Slowly and solemnly, yet
+joyfully, they march along, and it is all so clear to me that I can
+even hear the music that they chant as they come. Soft and low it is at
+first, and then it swells out fuller and stronger and clearer but
+always so noble and pure and stately in its melody and its rhythm that
+nobody who had once heard it could ever forget how grand and beautiful
+it was. I have heard it many times, and you will hear it often, too,
+and once, I hope--I almost know--you will hear it at one of the
+sweetest moments of your life, and whenever you hear it I think it will
+be more full of meaning for you if you will think of the Knight of the
+Swan and his bride. But do not think of what comes to them afterward,
+for that need never come to you or to anyone who remembers what I told
+you a little while ago; and if ever you feel tempted to forget for one
+moment, then think of this true and lovely music--you will know it well
+and can think of it when you like by that time--and I am sure you will
+feel truer and better again at once.
+
+"But the torches pass away and out of sight, and the knight and his
+bride are left alone; and now comes the sad part, for the poor bride
+has listened too much to those who spoke evil of her husband, or
+something evil has come into her own mind and made her forget her
+promise, for she tells him that she loves him so much that she wishes
+she might know what he is whom she loves. Now this may be very natural
+and might be very right if she had not promised never to ask; but
+though he begs her not to demand of him this one thing, yet she
+implores him more and more to tell her, till at last she speaks very
+cruelly to him, and as much as tells him that he does not love her at
+all. You would never think that she was the same poor girl who knelt by
+the river and prayed that her knight might be sent to help her in her
+danger. And suddenly, as he is about to tell her all she asks, her old
+accuser breaks into the room with his men, and rushes with his sword
+drawn to kill the knight, and now indeed his bride does seize his sword
+and hold it out to him, while he draws it from the sheath; then there
+is one little flash of a flame as he swings it high above his head, and
+his enemy lies at last dead before him. He tells the men to take him
+away and to lead his bride before the King, where he will come and tell
+her everything.
+
+"It is morning again on the banks of the river, and the knights and the
+people are coming in crowds as I saw them in the beginning. The King
+comes, and the poor bride, sadder now even than she was at first. The
+Knight of the Swan comes too, and he asks the King if he did right to
+kill his wicked enemy, who was trying to kill him unprepared. The King
+answers that he did right. Then he says that he cannot go with the King
+to his wars, because his bride has forgotten her promise to him, and
+has asked him whence he came, and now, by the law which he obeys, as
+soon as he has answered her, he must leave her and all the rest
+forever. Then, while they all listen in sorrow, he tells them that he
+is a Knight of the Holy Grail, and must go back to the temple which he
+left to come here and help his bride. And while she weeps at the
+thought of losing him, suddenly I see the swan again on the river,
+drawing the little boat as before, ready to take the knight away, and
+then he tells his bride that if she could but have trusted him and
+never questioned him for a year, her brother would have come back to
+her.
+
+"And now for one last time the witch stands up, more proud and
+revengeful then ever, and cries out that she has beaten them all, for
+the swan is really the brother, and that it was she who wound the chain
+about his neck that enchanted him and made him a swan. But while she
+exults in her triumph, there flies down over the heads of all of them a
+beautiful white dove. It is the dove that comes once a year to the
+temple and strengthens the power of the Holy Grail, and as the knight
+sees it he kneels and prays and then rises and unwinds the silver chain
+from the swan's neck, and at the very instant the swan is changed into
+a beautiful boy, the lost brother, and he runs to his sister and they
+clasp each other in their arms, while the witch falls down upon the
+ground, overcome at last and powerless, and the knight steps into the
+boat, the dove lifts the silver chain, and they glide away upon the
+river, farther and farther, and the little spot where they were, that
+was the brightest in the fire, grows dimmer and fainter and goes out
+and is dark."
+
+"And won't the knight come back at all?" asked the little girl.
+
+"No," I answered, "the brother and the sister are close in each other's
+arms and they are gazing away upon the river as far as they can see,
+but the Knight of the Swan will never come back."
+
+
+
+
+THE PRIZE OF A SONG
+
+
+The fire was almost out. It was so late in the spring that none at all
+was needed, but we liked it to look at. As for the little girl and me,
+we should hardly have known how to get on without it, and the little
+girl's mother chose to humor us, so we wasted a great deal of wood, as
+ignorant people would think, and were just as comfortable with the sky
+smiling and the trees budding all around us as if we had been in the
+midst of snow-drifts and howling storms. This afternoon the sun had
+been shining right in upon the fire, as if he would like to know what
+it was doing there at all, when he was making the weather quite warm
+enough, in the house as well as out. A fire never burns well when the
+sun shines on it, and besides, nobody had taken much care of ours, so
+that after the sun had gone it looked very low and discouraged.
+
+"Do you think anybody could see anything in a fire like that?" the
+little girl asked, with a doubtful gaze into it and a meaning, clearly
+enough, that, if I thought it at all possible for anybody to see
+anything, she wished that I myself would try.
+
+"We will put on another stick," I said, "and have a better fire. It
+will not be a very hot fire even then, and with all this soft spring
+air about us, I don't think we can see any more gods and giants and
+knights and dragons in it. But we may see some simpler people, with
+bright young hearts that begin to stir and move and to beat quicker and
+harder in the spring, as young hearts ought to do, not only in the
+spring of the year, but in their own spring, and we may perhaps see
+some people with older hearts, which stirred and beat too in their
+time, and we shall see by them that those which move freest and grow
+warmest in their spring are the fullest and the richest in their autumn
+and can never be hurt in the winter, just as the tree in which the sap
+flows best in the spring spreads out the broadest shade in the fierce
+heat of the summer, bears the finest fruit in the autumn, and lives the
+strongest till the next spring comes. If you ever tell any very learned
+people what we see here in this fire they may tell you, perhaps, that
+it all happened on Midsummer Day and not in the spring at all, and they
+will be quite right, in their own poor way of being right, but
+Midsummer Day is not in the middle of the summer, you know, but just at
+the beginning of it, when the spring has been gone only a few days. It
+is then that the lovely touch of the spring has done all that it can
+for the world, when the sun climbs his very highest in the heavens to
+look at all the sweetness and beauty that have been spread over the
+earth, when the summer is young and happy and kind and has not begun to
+burn and wither everything that would like to love its brightness and
+its power. So if you would see all the joy and the light that the
+spring can bring, you must look for them not far from Midsummer Day.
+
+"We shall not begin to see all this till our new stick begins to burn
+better, but in the meantime we may see some things that are pleasant
+enough, if they are not quite so radiant, and while the fire is still
+rather dark, just burning quietly in a few little places, we seem to me
+to be in a dim, old church. The service is just ending. In one of the
+pews sits a pretty girl who is behaving herself in a most unbecoming
+way, for she is constantly sending shy glances toward a young man who
+leans against a pillar not far off and looks at her in his turn in a
+way that really ought to shock her, instead of pleasing her, as it
+seems to do."
+
+"Is he a knight?" asked the little girl, instinctively knowing him for
+the hero of the story.
+
+"Do you want him to be a knight?"
+
+"Oh, yes; let's have just one knight, if we can't have any giants or
+dragons."
+
+"I believe you are beginning to see the pictures in the fire yourself.
+Well, he shall be a knight, but he shall not wear any armor and he
+shall not fight, and all the rest of the people we see shall be quite
+common people, mere tradesmen, a goldsmith and a tailor and a toy-maker
+and a cobbler and the like. But whether the young man is a knight or
+not, he and the pretty girl ought to know better than to look at each
+other in that way in church, with looks that seem to mean so much and
+yet to have no connection with the service at all. The service is over
+now and the people all leave the church, except a few, but the young
+knight and the pretty girl stay behind, and he does not lose a minute
+in telling her that he loves her and that he is dreadfully anxious to
+know if she can love him. Now, of course, as she has done nothing all
+through the service but steal glances at him and probably could not
+even tell what hymns were sung, or whether there was a sermon or not,
+and has been thinking all the time how handsome he was, and knows very
+well that he was looking at her all the time, and knows very well, too,
+being a pretty girl, that he was thinking how pretty she was, of
+course, you see, she could not tell at all whether she could love him
+or not, and such a question naturally throws her into the greatest
+confusion.
+
+"But while the young man is saying all the pretty things that the time
+allows, and the young woman is trying to think what she shall answer,
+her maid, who has been running about all this time, looking for things
+she has lost, bustles up, hears a part of what the young man says, and
+tells him that her mistress is already betrothed; and the mistress
+quickly says yes, but that nobody yet knows to whom. This is such a
+surprising state of things that it needs an explanation; so the maid
+tells the young knight that her mistress is to be given as bride for a
+prize to-morrow, which will be Midsummer Day, to the man who shall sing
+the best song. He asks if the bride herself is to judge whose song is
+best; and at that she makes up her mind at last, and says that she will
+choose nobody but him. But there is something else, for nobody can even
+try for the prize unless he belongs to a certain company or society of
+poets and singers here in the town, and the knight, though he has a
+pretty good opinion of the song he could make if he should try, is
+quite a stranger here. And now, as if for the very purpose of helping
+the knight, comes another young man, who turns out to be a prentice,
+and he begins arranging benches and chairs in some queer sort of way,
+while the looks that he casts at the maid and the looks she throws back
+at him show that they are not total strangers; and he tells them that
+these very poets and singers are to meet here in a few minutes, and
+that if anybody wants to join them he will have a chance to sing to
+them and to prove whether he is worthy.
+
+"So the young man of course determines that he will try, and it is
+clear that he expects nothing in the world but that he will carry
+everything before him; and while the young women hurry away, the
+prentice tells him something about the singers, who are always called
+masters, and the queer rules that they have for making all their songs.
+Queer enough they are, too, and so many that if you were to hear them
+all you would think that they were quite enough to prevent anybody's
+ever making a song at all; but the most important thing that the knight
+learns is that, while he is singing, the judge will make a mark with
+chalk every time he breaks a rule, and, if more than seven chalk marks
+are scored against him, he cannot be a master, and so cannot try for
+the prize that he wants so much to win to-morrow.
+
+"Now the masters begin to gather for their meeting, coming in one by
+one and two by two. First comes a goldsmith, the father of the pretty
+girl we have just seen. With him is a queer-looking, awkward, self-
+conceited man, who, anybody can see in a minute, must be a town clerk.
+From what he is saying to the goldsmith it is clear that he means to
+try for the prize of his daughter's hand to-morrow. He is in no doubt
+that he can sing better than anybody else, but is not sure that the
+goldsmith's daughter will think so. That is a very unlucky thing that
+happens to singers sometimes; they themselves know perfectly well that
+they can sing better than anybody else anywhere about, but all the
+other people are so stupid that they will not understand it.
+
+"The young knight, who knows the goldsmith, tells him now that he wants
+to join this company of singers, and be a master too; and the goldsmith
+says that he shall be glad to help all he can. But the town clerk
+overhears them, and he sees at once that what the knight wants is to
+sing for the prize to-morrow. Now, the rule is, you remember, that
+nobody but a master may even try for the prize; so the jealous town
+clerk resolves that he will keep the young man from becoming a master.
+And it happens, by good luck for him and bad luck for the knight, that
+it is his turn to-day to take the chalk and mark the mistakes that are
+made in singing by anybody who tries to prove himself worthy to be a
+master.
+
+"When the masters are all met, the goldsmith makes a little speech, and
+tells them how the prize is to be given to-morrow. They are to decide
+who wins, but his daughter is to judge too. She may choose none without
+their voice, but she may refuse any. That is no more than fair, of
+course. No girl would like to be married to a man just because the
+lines of his poetry came out right when somebody else counted them. Yet
+the masters all argue and dispute and suggest about the rules; but in
+the end they agree to do just what the goldsmith says, since they
+cannot do anything else.
+
+"Now comes the trial of the young knight who wants to be a master. The
+town clerk goes behind a curtain, with his slate and his chalk, and you
+may be sure he does not forget his promise to himself that the knight
+shall fail. Then the young man stands up in the midst of them all and
+sings his song. A happy, free, beautiful song it is. It tells first how
+the spring came into the forest and awakened the trees and brought the
+flowers. Then it tells how the spring came into the young man's own
+heart, as you know I told you it ought to do, and how it made him sing
+of love; and that is quite right too, though perhaps I forgot to say so
+before.
+
+"But happy and beautiful as the song is, it is scarcely begun before
+the most dreadful scratching of the chalk is heard behind the curtain.
+All the masters begin to shake their heads, too, for this knight is
+bold enough to make his own song in his own way, and he knows and cares
+no more about the rules and measures of these masters for making songs
+than you know or care about the game laws of Scotland. So by the time
+the song is half over, out rushes the town clerk with his slate, not
+with the eight marks on it that would end the singer's hopes of being a
+master, but with nearer eighty. He vows the case is hopeless, and as he
+shows the slate to the other masters they all seem to agree with him,
+though they are not all quite so jealous as he is.
+
+"All but one; for there is one old shoemaker who says that he thinks
+the song was very good. It did not follow the rules, but it had rules
+of its own, and he liked it. Then there is trouble indeed. For any man
+to say in this old church and this old town that a song can be good
+when it has one line too many or one rhyme too few is almost as bad as
+for him to say that the King is bald-headed and that the oldest
+princess has freckles. All the masters say that to let such a song pass
+is out of the question, and that the shoemaker is quite absurd to think
+of such a thing. At this the shoemaker declares that the town clerk is
+not a fair judge, because he is jealous. At that again the town clerk
+says that the shoemaker had better not talk so much about poetry, but
+go home and finish the shoes he has ordered. Now, the shoemaker is
+really the only one of all the masters who knows anything at all about
+poetry; but now and then, years ago, a man who knew a great deal had to
+stand aside and let others, who knew very little but could talk louder,
+do what they liked in their own way. That is what the shoemaker has to
+do now, and for this time the knight has failed.
+
+"What a bad fire we have, to be sure! It is getting lower and lower,
+and even our new stick will not burn. While everything is as dark as
+this we shall have to think that it is night. Never mind, we can see a
+little still, and the little that I can see is the street of the old
+town, with its queer old houses and peaked roofs and sharp steeples.
+Here, on one side, where there is a bit of light shining like a glow in
+a window, is the shop of our old cobbler; and over there, with no light
+at all, the fire is so bad, is the goldsmith's house. The cobbler is
+sitting outside his door, trying to work; but the light is as bad for
+him as it is for us, and, besides, he cannot think of his work, much
+less do it. He is thinking, I know, of the young knight and his song,
+and is wishing that he might win the prize to-morrow, master or no
+master. His heart had its spring-time once, you may be sure, and its
+glowing summer, and they have brought it a rich, peaceful autumn, such
+as they alone can bring. That was why he knew all the meaning of the
+song and liked it, though it broke every one of his own rules. And so,
+like the good old fellow that he is, he wishes the man who sang the
+song all joy and good luck--and the prize.
+
+"While he is thinking of all this, comes the goldsmith's daughter, for
+she has heard that the young man has failed, and she is sad, and wants
+to talk to some one. Perhaps, too, she wants to know something. They
+talk about to-morrow, of course, and the shoemaker tells her that the
+town clerk means to sing for the prize. At that the prize herself gets
+quite alarmed, for she likes the town clerk no better than you or I do.
+'But why should he not win?' the shoemaker says; 'there will not be
+many bachelors there to try.'
+
+"'And might not a widower try?' she asks slyly.
+
+"Now, the shoemaker knows that she means himself, but he says no, he is
+too old. And then the absurd girl actually urges him to try, though she
+does not want him the least bit, and does not want anybody except the
+young knight, who makes such beautiful songs that are all out of shape.
+When you get to be a woman, perhaps you will know why she does this;
+but I confess I do not. Perhaps she thinks that the shoemaker would not
+be half so bad as the town clerk, or perhaps she only wants to find out
+if the shoemaker really does mean to sing, so that she may know whether
+he is the knight's friend or his enemy. At any rate, he pretends to be
+not half so much the friend of the young people as I know he really is,
+and when she is beginning to get quite angry with him her maid comes
+and tries to lead her into the house. But just at this moment the
+knight himself is seen coming down the street, and not a step toward
+the house does she go after that.
+
+"The shoemaker has gone into his shop now, and the lovers are alone. He
+tells her how he sang his very best, that he might be a master, because
+that was the only way to win her, and it was of no use. But she does
+not care whether he failed or not. She declares that he is a poet, that
+she will give the prize herself and to nobody but him; so now what do
+you suppose it matters to him if all the masters in the world said that
+his songs were wrong? He will not sing for them, and they need not
+listen.
+
+"There is just one way now, as anybody can see, for him to make sure of
+the prize, and that is to take it while he has it. And that is just
+what he is about to do. But I am sorry to see that the cobbler, behind
+the door of his shop, has been impolite enough to listen to all this
+important talk about poets and songs; and he sees that if he lets these
+two run away together now, there will be no prize and no singing for
+to-morrow. So he sets a lamp in his window, right there where the fire
+is kind enough to burn for us a little at last, and sends the light
+streaming out across the street, and the lovers know that if they try
+to pass they will be seen. And while they are helping each other think
+what they can do, somebody else comes slowly down the street, walking
+in the shadows and looking around to see if he is watched, like a
+burglar. It is the town clerk, and he has come here just to sing under
+the window of the goldsmith's daughter the song that he means to sing
+to-morrow, to see if she will like it and if she will probably give it
+the prize. Oh, he is a good, honest poet and faithful lover, and he
+means to leave nothing untried that can help him. One does not get a
+chance to marry a goldsmith's daughter every day.
+
+"All this is annoying enough, but there is nothing for the lovers to do
+but to wait for the town clerk to sing and go away; so they get into
+the deepest shadow, and then they put their arms around each other so
+that they can stand closer and not be seen so easily. It is a good plan
+for another reason, too, because some people can wait much more
+patiently in that position than in any other. But things are getting
+worse and worse, for the shoe-maker seems bound to have his part of the
+fun too; and just as the town clerk is about to sing he begins to work
+again and to hammer on his last. This is the most impolite shoemaker, I
+suppose, that this polite old town ever saw, if he is a poet. Think of
+a man who will hammer on a shoe when a town clerk is going to sing, and
+a song that he made himself, too. Something must be done, of course; so
+the town clerk comes and talks with the cobbler, and pretends that he
+is very anxious to get his opinion of the song he is going to sing.
+That seems natural enough, because everybody knows that the cobbler is
+the best poet in town. So they agree that whenever the town clerk
+breaks a rule in his song the cobbler shall strike one blow on his
+last, just as if he were marking the mistakes on the slate, the way the
+town clerk himself did with the knight.
+
+"Oh, but he must be a good town clerk, he knows so many tricks, and can
+always arrange everything so well to make it go his way. The town is
+lucky to have such a clerk. Yet, strange to say, the minute he begins
+to sing, he makes more mistakes than even the poor young knight did,
+and it is really a question whether his song or the shoemaker's
+pounding makes the more noise. Mind, I say noise, not music; if it were
+a question of music the shoemaker would be far ahead. Well, between
+them, they wake up the shoemaker's prentice, and he comes to the window
+of the shop, to see what is the matter. He is the same prentice whom we
+saw in the church, who looked at the goldsmith's daughter's maid in
+such a strange way, you remember. And now, as he looks across at the
+house opposite, he sees the goldsmith's daughter's maid again, standing
+at the window. She is standing there in one of her mistress's gowns, to
+make the town clerk think that the mistress herself is listening to his
+song; and he does think so, but the poor prentice knows who she is very
+well indeed. And since he knows who she is, of course he makes up his
+mind at once that the town clerk is singing to her, that he loves her,
+and that just as likely as not she loves him. No doubt you think he
+might know better; and perhaps he might, if he were not so much in love
+with the goldsmith's daughter's maid; but when a man is in love he is
+always ready to believe anything that it is particularly uncomfortable
+for him to believe.
+
+"So, what does the shoemaker's prentice do but jump right out of the
+window, fetch the good town clerk one blow under the chin, that shuts
+his mouth and stops his singing, and begin just as lively a fight with
+him as any we ever saw among our knights and giants and dragons. They
+make so much noise that more people wake up, and come out of their
+houses into the street; and, since the old town is usually a bit dull
+and quiet, they find this just the sort of thing they like, and they
+all begin fighting, too, with a jolly good will. Of course, not one of
+them has the slightest notion of what he is fighting about; but that
+makes no difference to any good, honest fighter, and there is a fine
+breaking of heads and kicking of shins. Just as everything is in the
+most delightful confusion possible, the knight and the goldsmith's
+daughter try to make their way through the crowd and escape; but the
+troublesome old shoemaker, who has been watching them from the very
+beginning, runs quickly out, pushes the girl to her own door, where her
+father stands to receive her, drags the knight into his shop, seizes
+his prentice too, and shuts his door behind him. Somebody cries that
+the watchman is coming; the people scatter right and left, and, by the
+time that little flame there under the andiron has burned up and shown
+itself to me as the old watchman's lantern, it shines on nothing but
+the quiet, empty street.
+
+"But there is more light than the watchman's lantern, for our new stick
+is beginning to burn now. The night must be past, and, if the night is
+past, it is Midsummer Day. It is not so bright yet as it might be. Let
+us put on still another stick, and have all the Midsummer weather we
+can. I see a room now, not very handsome or rich, but very comfortable
+and cheerful, with flowers in the window and more flowers scattered
+about. It is the old shoemaker's shop, and the old shoemaker himself
+sits at the window, pretending to read, but really thinking, as usual,
+about the young knight who sings to please himself and not to obey
+other people's rules, and about the goldsmith's daughter; and he is
+trying, also as usual, to plan some way to make the prize go as he
+wants it to go. He does not quite see how it is to be done, but he has
+a comfortable feeling that it will all come out right; and while he is
+studying over it, the knight himself comes put of the room where he has
+slept to say good-morning.
+
+"He tells the shoemaker that he has had a beautiful dream, and the
+shoemaker asks him what it was, saying that it is the true business of
+a poet to have dreams and to tell them, so that everybody may know
+them. So the knight tells his dream, making it into a song as he goes
+along, and now and then the shoemaker stops him quietly to tell him
+what are the rules of the masters for making such songs as this. The
+knight always asks why such rules should be, and the shoemaker gives
+him some pretty reason for each one, and he shows that the rules are
+not so bad after all, if only one knows how to use them and to make the
+most of them. The dream was about a beautiful garden with a tree that
+bore fruit of gold, and as the dreamer looked at it there came a lovely
+maiden, who you may be sure was the goldsmith's daughter, and she
+embraced him and then pointed to the fruit of the tree, and when she
+pointed to it, it was golden fruit no longer, but stars, and the tree
+itself was a laurel-tree.
+
+"You may guess that the poor old masters never heard such a song as
+this. As the knight sings it the shoemaker writes it down on a bit of
+paper and tells the knight to remember the melody, and then they go
+away together. Scarcely have they gone when the door opens softly and
+in a treacherous-looking sort of way that must be strange to the
+shoemaker's door, and in comes the town clerk. Ridiculous enough he
+looks in his gorgeous holiday clothes, and limping along, because of
+the beating that the prentice gave him last night. And angry enough he
+is, too, with the shoemaker and the prentice and the knight and the
+world in general, except himself, with whom it might be reasonable for
+him to be angry. You can see a wicked red glow, right there in the
+middle of the fire, where he stands. But he has not forgotten about the
+prize--oh, not in the least. He is still plotting and contriving how he
+can best make sure of it, and so it does not take long for his sharp
+little eyes to find the song lying on the table, where the shoemaker
+left it when he went out.
+
+"Now, there is one peculiar thing about these people who can see
+through mill-stones, and that is, that they sometimes think they are
+seeing through one when there is really no mill-stone there at all;
+just as you and I might think we were looking through a glass window
+when it was only an empty sash. Just see, for instance, how much
+cleverer the town clerk is than there is any sort of need for him to
+be. He sees that this song is a song; well, anybody could see that. He
+sees that it is in the shoemaker's handwriting; anybody who knew the
+shoemaker's handwriting could see that. But now he takes the liberty of
+guessing that the shoemaker made this song himself, and that he is
+going to sing it himself for the prize. So he gets more angry still,
+for he knows that the shoemaker is the best poet in all this dear old
+town, where anybody can be a poet by learning the rules, and he knows
+that if the shoemaker tries to win the prize he will probably do so.
+But he hears the shoemaker coming back and he has just time to hide the
+song in his pocket.
+
+"Now he boldly accuses the shoemaker of meaning to sing for the prize.
+It may seem to you that it is no affair of his whether the shoemaker
+means to sing or not, and it may seem so to me too, but we are not town
+clerks. Yet the shoemaker assures him that he does not mean to sing,
+accuses him in turn of stealing the song, and then, to prove his own
+words, gives it to him. With that the town clerk is altogether
+delighted, for he is one of those shallow people who think that when
+one man has done a good thing, another man can do just as well as he by
+doing the same thing. He feels sure that if he sings one of the
+shoemaker's songs he cannot fail to win the prize, and he makes the
+shoemaker promise that, whatever happens, he will not claim the song as
+his. The shoemaker is quite ready to promise anything, because he is a
+wise old soul and he knows that it is not altogether what one does, but
+pretty largely how one does it, as a cobbler or as a town clerk or as a
+singer, that wins him fame and honor--and Midsummer Day prizes.
+
+"The town clerk hobbles away, and now who should come in but the
+goldsmith's daughter herself? Well, no one could wonder at her lover's
+having pleasant dreams, for she is as pretty a prize as ever a poet
+sang a song for, or to, or about. With her best gown and her flowers
+and her jewels, and especially with herself, I don't think you could
+find any prize that a poet would rather have, even in a town twice as
+big as this. It seems there is something wrong about the shoe that the
+cobbler has made for her to wear to-day, and she has come to get him to
+mend it. I wonder, by the way, if she knows that the knight was the
+shoemaker's guest last night. She says that when she wants to
+standstill the shoe insists on walking, and when she wants to walk the
+shoe makes up its mind to stand still. You see yourself what a
+remarkable and improper way this is for a shoe to behave. It is so
+strange that I am inclined to doubt if it is the fault of the shoe at
+all, or if she really knows whether she wants to walk or stand still.
+You see it is not easy for us to tell just how a girl would feel at
+being put up for a prize.
+
+"While the cobbler is at work on the shoe, the knight too appears, and
+the cobbler hints that he should like to hear the rest of the dream
+that the young man began to tell him before. So he sings more of his
+song and tells how the stars among the branches of the laurel-tree
+formed a crown for the lovely maiden's head, how her eyes, as he looked
+into her face, were to him brighter than all of them, and how then she
+twined with her own hand, about his head, the wreath of the star-fruit
+of the laurel-tree, and still and always he saw her eyes brighter than
+the stars.
+
+"After he has sung this they all seem to understand one another better.
+The goldsmith's daughter's maid comes in to look for her mistress, the
+prentice tumbles in to look for the maid, or for something else, and
+away they all start for the fields outside the town, where all who
+will--that is, if they are masters and may--are to sing for the prize.
+
+"At last the fire is burning as it ought, and we can see all the life
+and light that we care to enjoy. Those flames that stream up so far
+must mean that the sun has mounted his very highest to mark the noon of
+Midsummer Day, and the floods of merry sparks that pour up the chimney
+are not brighter or merrier than the throngs of people, men and women,
+boys and girls, that walk and run, and caper and dance, and tumble out
+of the city gates and into the meadows where the singing is to be. But
+there is more gravity all at once when the masters come. They are
+mighty and important persons at any time, and above all they are so
+to-day, when they are to decide who is to have this wonderful prize.
+They have a higher place to sit than the rest of the meadow, and the
+common people of the town, who do not pretend to be poets at all, can
+stand wherever they can find room. The goldsmith and his daughter have
+the highest seats of all, and the shoemaker is next to them, for he is
+supposed to know a good song when he hears it. All the other masters
+have good places too, including the town clerk. The knight is somewhere
+in the crowd of people who know nothing about poetry.
+
+[Illustration: "HE SAW HER EYES BRIGHTER THAN THE STARS."]
+
+"When everything is ready the town clerk is the first to sing his song
+for the prize, because he is the oldest of those who are to try, and
+indeed he seems to be about the only one, with the knight quite out of
+the race, because he did so badly in the church yesterday. So the town
+clerk stands forth, and after a little opening plink-plunk on his
+guitar, he tries to sing the knight's own song, which the shoemaker
+gave him, knowing well that he would get into trouble with it. And
+indeed, the dream that he tells about must have been a nightmare,
+though nobody who hears him knows what it is about, and the poor town
+clerk seems to know least of all. He has the song under his coat and
+tries to look at it now and then, but he reads it wrong and sings
+nonsense, and in a moment all the people are laughing at him, even
+those who do not know a good song when they hear it, for they seem to
+know a bad song very well when they hear it.
+
+"At that he gets angry, stops singing, and says that the song is not
+his at all but the shoemaker's, and he is to blame. Here is a fine
+state of things, for the shoemaker is supposed, as I said before, to
+know more about songs than any of the other people in town, and indeed
+he knows more about most things than all of them put together. He says
+that the song is not his, but that it is good enough, if only it could
+be sung right, and he asks if there is anybody here who knows how to
+sing it.
+
+"This is the time for the young knight, and he comes forward from the
+crowd and says that he will try. But first, the shoemaker makes all the
+masters promise that if he sings the song well and if it is a good song
+he shall have all the honor just as if he were a master. Now the young
+man takes his place and everybody is still. He looks straight at the
+goldsmith's daughter; he does not know that there are any others around
+him; and now he sings. And what a glorious song it is, full of hope and
+happiness and victory and joy! He did not sing like this to the masters
+in the church yesterday; not even to the shoemaker this morning did he
+sing like this. It is not hard to see the reason. Yesterday he tried to
+be a master, and when he sang he was wondering how these fussy old
+fellows would measure his song with their rhyme-gauges and their foot-
+rules. How could anybody sing when he was thinking of that? Even then
+it was not a bad song and the goldsmith's daughter would have known it
+if she had been the judge. The shoemaker, with his warm old spring-time
+heart, knew it as it was, but the masters were too learned ever to know
+anything. But now the goldsmith's daughter is the judge and the young
+poet sings only to her, only for her, only about her. If one smile
+curves her pretty lips as he sings, it is more to him than the shouts
+of all the people. That is the way to sing, and that is why, when he is
+done, all the people do shout, and do clap their hands and wave their
+hats, and do cry out that he must have the prize.
+
+"And he does have the prize. She crowns his head with a wreath of
+laurel, which he cares for only because she sets it there, and the
+goldsmith himself brings him the gold chain that makes him a master.
+This the young man would put aside, but the wise old shoemaker bids him
+take this too, and to honor the masters and their art; for, he says,
+though the Holy Roman Empire should vanish in smoke, yet art will
+remain. And I think he means by this that all the kingdoms of the earth
+may be lost and may fall into dust and ashes, as our fire here will do
+when we leave it to-night, but that the happy young people, with their
+stirring hearts of spring, and the kindly old people, with their ripe
+hearts of autumn, will still sing songs and still tell stories."
+
+
+
+
+THE BLOOD-RED SAIL
+
+
+The fire had been out for weeks. Somebody who came from the country had
+almost filled the fireplace with a huge bouquet of wild roses. They
+made it look very pretty for a few days, but now the roses had all
+faded and fallen to pieces too, and nobody cared enough even to sweep
+up the dry, dead leaves and throw them out. It all looked forsaken and
+desolate enough. But it was no more desolate than I. We were lonely and
+unhappy for the same reason, the poor fireplace and I, because the
+little girl had gone away with her mother down to the sea and would not
+be back for more weeks and weeks yet. The city was so hot and dull and
+stupid! It made me feel dull and stupid to stay in it, except when it
+made me angry. Yet perhaps the fireplace was even a little worse off
+than I, though it was not more forsaken and alone, for it had no work
+to do, while I had plenty. Then again the fireplace, in spite of all
+the wonderful and beautiful things we had seen in it sometimes, had
+never been anywhere except just where it was now, and it knew nothing
+about the sea. But I had been in several other places; and even in the
+city, with the heat pouring down from the sky and quivering up from the
+pavements, one can dream of "waters, winds, and rocks," and dreams are
+good things to have for those who can have nothing else.
+
+And I had the dreams and something else. For the little girl and her
+mother had said that I might come down to the sea too, whenever I
+thought the city could get on without me. What surprised me was that
+the city got on at all, but all the time I thought more and more that I
+was of no use to it, and it was of no use to me, and finally I left all
+my work in it to take care of itself and fled away to the sea. Oh, how
+lovely it was! That first long unbroken sight of the line where the sky
+and the water met made me feel, as I always feel at such times, that it
+was worth half the year's worry and care just to see this ocean and
+this heaven, to breathe this free, salt air, to smell the flowers by
+the roadside, and to gaze and gaze again at the two great tracts of
+peaceful blue. How wonderful is this calm rest of a thing that can rage
+and destroy when it will! The peace of a field of daisies is pretty and
+sweet; the peace of the ocean is like that of God.
+
+The little girl and I had a long walk along the beaches, over the
+rocks, and through the tall, salt grass. We hunted among the smooth,
+round pebbles for the smoothest and the roundest; we studied the jelly-
+fish that was borne up the beach by the wave and then glided swiftly
+back again with it, as if it had forgotten something, till one wave,
+higher than the others, would leave it lying on the sand at our feet,
+where we could study it as much as we liked; we wondered if the jelly-
+fish ever did forget anything and if he had remembered it now, so that
+he did not want to go back any more. We caught little crabs and made
+them run races, laying huge wagers on our favorites; I filled my
+pocket, and the little girl filled her handkerchief with the tiny,
+pointed shells that can be strung into such pretty necklaces. Then we
+found a great, bright, curly ribbon of seaweed, as wide as two hands,
+so long that when the little girl held it by the middle she could
+scarcely lift the ends off the sand, and rich and beautiful in color
+like dark-red tortoise-shell. The little girl looped one end of it
+around her head and wound the rest about her body, so that she looked a
+true little sea princess.
+
+All day a fresh, cool breeze came up from the sea, so different from
+the air of the dreadful city. Toward evening it grew cooler yet. The
+wind blew more, and little shreds and patches of fog, and then larger
+clouds of it, hurried along over the fields. We could see them coming,
+away off over the water, then they reached the shore and hid the walls
+and the pastures, then they wrapped us up within themselves and passed
+us, and we saw them flying off again as if they were trying to carry a
+chill from the sea as far into the land as they could. And it was
+chilly after the sun was quite gone--not very cold, but just cool
+enough so that everybody thought it would be pleasant to have a bit of
+fire on the hearth. And when we thought a fire would be pleasant we
+always had it.
+
+Of course down there we never think of making a fire of anything but
+driftwood. It makes the most wonderful, magical fire in the world. One
+could dream out stories for a whole evening from the wood alone. Here
+is a stick that must have been a part of a spar. Was it blown away from
+the mast in a gale? Now hold your breath and think if some poor sailor
+was blown off into the waves with it. Did he catch at this very stick
+as he sank? Did his wife wait and wait for him at home, till his
+shipmate came and told her? Here is a little piece of smooth board,
+with a bit of cornice fastened to the end. It must be from the wall of
+a cabin. Did the captain's daughter and the young mate sit under it and
+whisper stories to each other in the calm evenings of the voyage? There
+is a piece of barrel-stave. Perhaps it once held rum for the sailors'
+grog; it burns as if it did. There again is a float from a fisherman's
+net. Was the net torn when it broke away, and did the fisherman lose
+some fish? And because of that did his sweetheart perhaps lose a ribbon
+or a trinket? Then here is a broken fragment of a lobster pot. Even
+this might be some loss to a poor man. And not only are all these
+things and a hundred times as many more to be thought of, but all this
+wood has been soaked in the salts of the sea, and when it burns the
+flames are of all sorts of strange and beautiful and ghostly colors--
+white and red and green and blue and yellow and violet.
+
+Everybody feels the charm of a driftwood fire. The little girl surely
+could not help feeling it, and she came and sat on the stool at my
+feet, leaned her head against my knee, and gazed at the flames without
+saying a word. But I answered her thought. "Yes," I said, "we may see
+almost anything in that fire. Look at that strip of cocoanut husk. Does
+it not tell of green palm-groves and sunny skies and warm breezes? Yet
+as it lies there on its curved side, with the two ends lifted from the
+hearth, has it not the shape of a galley, like those in which the rude
+old pirates of the North used to sweep over the sea, bringing terror to
+all who came in their way? It is all burnt and blackened, and right
+over it rises a tall flame of bright red. It is a black ship, with
+sails all of the color of blood. The strangest of ships it is, and it
+has the strangest of stories.
+
+"Long, long years ago, in a fearful storm, the captain tried to sail
+this ship around the cape. The captain of another ship hailed him and
+asked him if he did not mean to find a harbor for the night. But he
+swore a terrible oath that he would sail around the cape in spite of
+Davy Jones, if it took till doomsday. At this Davy Jones was angry, and
+swore on his part that it should take till doomsday, that the captain
+should sail in the storm till then and should never get around the
+cape. Do you know who Davy Jones is? He is the wicked spirit of the
+sea. When the winds and the waves rage and tear away the sails of the
+ships, or sink the ships or drive them upon the reefs, it is his work;
+when it is all smooth and calm and sparkling, as we saw it to-day, then
+the good fairies of the sea are there and are making everything about
+it calm and happy.
+
+"But the fairies never came near this ship. She was always driven
+about, and there was a storm wherever she went. Never could her captain
+bring her into any port and never could he round the cape. Only for
+years and years he sailed and sailed in the storm, and found no harbor
+and no rest. At first he was bold and tried to sail on and gain his
+port; then he was angry and raged again, and swore that he would not be
+beaten; then he was in despair; and at last he grew so weary with the
+storm and the sea and the clouds and again the wind and the sky and the
+ocean and yet the rain and the waves and the fog, that he longed only
+to die and to be at peace.
+
+"But he did not die, and no one of his crew died. The sailors all grew
+old, and their hair and their beards were white, and they looked like
+ghosts, and their ship was like the ghost of a ship; but they were not
+ghosts; they were real men and they sailed in a real ship. Sometimes
+the crews of other ships saw them. Sometimes they hailed the crews of
+the other ships and begged them to take letters to their friends at
+home. They said that their almanac had been blown away and they did not
+know how long they had been from home. They would lower a boat and row
+to the ship they had hailed, in a sea that would swamp any other boat
+in half a minute, and so they would bring their letters on deck. Those
+who knew their story refused to take the letters, and then the sailors
+would nail them to the mast or lay them on the deck, with a heavy
+weight to keep them from blowing away, and go back to their own ship.
+So the letters sometimes reached their homes, for it was said to bring
+bad luck either to take their letters willingly or to throw them away
+when they were left on the ship.
+
+"But oh, what of those to whom the letters were sent? Once a captain
+brought a packet of them to the port from which the strange ship had
+sailed. Not one of those to whom they were directed could be found, and
+he opened some of them, hoping that the letters themselves might tell
+him some way of finding the sailors' friends. One of the sailors had
+written to his father that after this voyage he meant to live on the
+land with him and never to go to sea again. When the captain took this
+letter to its address, he found a man of the right name, but the man
+said: 'No, no, the letter is not for me; no son of mine is a sailor.
+None of our family ever went to sea except one, for there is an old
+story that my great-grandfather's brother once went away in a ship and
+that the ship was never heard of again. For years his old father used
+to dream about him and to declare that his ship still floated, and he
+died believing that his boy was yet alive. No, that is my name on the
+letter, but it is not for me' One sailor had sent a bank-note to his
+sister, but where her house stood there was a church, and it had been
+there for a hundred years. Another in his letter sent a pressed
+tropical flower to his sweetheart. It was of the color that looked
+pretty in her hair, but the poor fellow forgot that pressing it would
+spoil it for that. The captain, despairing of delivering the letters,
+went into the church, and there, on one of the stones of the floor, he
+read the sweetheart's name. It said that she was ninety years old when
+she died, and the words were almost worn away by the feet that had
+crossed them. The captain dropped the flower upon the stone, and the
+next morning it was swept away.
+
+"So the sailors grew so old that it seemed they could not grow any
+older. Then slowly they began to know what they had always refused to
+believe, that they had been sailing for years and for hundreds of
+years, and that all who ever knew them and loved them had been long,
+long dead. Then their eyes grew more hollow, and their hair and their
+long beards thinner, and their faces more wrinkled and withered, and it
+was as if all the blood had dried out of their hearts. Perhaps it was
+when the blood went out of their hearts that it stained the sails that
+dreadful red. So much for the crew, but it was different with the
+captain. Davy Jones was preparing something worse yet for him, or
+thought he was. He was tired of seeing him simply wander hopelessly on
+the ocean; he wanted to plague him more. He could do this, he thought,
+by giving him now and then a little hope and then shattering it and
+sinking it to the bottom of the sea, and dragging the man's heart to
+the bottom of the sea, too, with a leaden load of despair.
+
+"The captain had never grown to look old, and now, to carry out his
+wicked plan, Davy Jones promised that once in every seven years he
+might enter a port and go on shore, and if ever he should find a good
+woman who would love him and give her life for him, he might rest and
+never sail again; but when he failed to find such a woman he must go on
+board his ship again and sail through the storm and the wind and the
+waves for seven years more. Now, Davy Jones would never have promised
+this if he had thought that there could be such a good and loving
+woman, but being only a wicked spirit of the sea he did not know much
+about good women.
+
+"And for a long time his plan did succeed and the poor captain was more
+wretched than ever. Once in seven years he would go on shore to seek
+that true woman, and as often he would return to his ship and sail
+away. Good women he found many, but none of them would love him. Then
+his heart would fill with bitterness, for he saw them loving and giving
+their lives to men who, he could not but know, were less brave and
+patient and worthy of them than he; faithless men who forgot them,
+cruel men who misused them, dull men who knew not their own blessings.
+Why should they love such men as these and never him? Now, you and I,
+who are so wise, know, of course, that such thoughts were selfish and
+wicked. For what was he to any woman that she should give her life, or
+even an hour of it, for him? Was his life or his peace better than
+another's, that another's should be given for his? Why should any woman
+love him when there were so many others for her to love?
+
+"But he never thought of these things, so he would rage against all
+women and he would steer his ship into the most awful waves and
+whirlpools, hoping that she would be wrecked and sunk, but his ship was
+never harmed; and he would steer toward pirates, hoping that they would
+kill him for the chests of gold he had, but even the pirates, when they
+saw his blood-red sails, would cross themselves and flee from him. Then
+the seven years would pass and he would go on shore, and now, perhaps,
+a woman would say that she loved him; yet when the time came she would
+not give her life for him, and he would throw himself down upon his
+face on the deck of his ship and steer nowhere, but still drive on
+through the wind, the black waves, the black storm, and his own blacker
+despair."
+
+"Oh, my!" said the little girl, "that's awfully nice and ghosty, but I
+thought this was the best fire we ever had, and now you don't see
+anything in it at all."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," I replied, "I have seen the ship all the time, that
+black ship with its sail of red flame. I have seen it tossing upon the
+sea, sweeping up till the flame of its sail almost touched the clouds,
+and then plunging down into the black water, but always, always rushing
+on with the storm around it and with never any rest. And I have seen
+the angry clouds tearing across the sky; you can see them yourself when
+the smoke flies up the chimney, and then when the white flames are
+flickering and flashing up and then dying down, you can think that you
+see the lightning. Yes, and you cannot help hearing the wind, whistling
+up there around the top of the chimney as it would whistle through the
+rigging of a ship.
+
+"The seven years have passed again, and now the ship has come to land,
+that the captain may try the little chance once more that has failed
+him so often. The red flame has dropped down, for the sails are furled,
+and the wind has stopped for a minute, too, while the ship is at
+anchor, and there is no need for the storm to pursue it. I see the
+captain walking on the shore and talking with the master of another
+ship that is anchored near by. The master tells him that he lives only
+a few miles away, and asks him if he will come and spend the night with
+him on shore. The captain replies that for a little rest at his house
+he will give the master untold treasures from his ship. He makes a sign
+to his men and they bring a big chest. He opens it and shows the master
+that it is full to the top of gold and pearls and rubies and emeralds,
+that flash and shine with all the colors that ever our driftwood fire
+can show us.
+
+[Illustration: "THROUGH THE BLACK STORM AND HIS OWN BLACKER DESPAIR."]
+
+"Such a price for a night's or a year's lodging the master never
+dreamed of. He cannot believe that such wealth is all for him, and he
+asks what he can ever do for the captain to earn it. 'Have you not a
+daughter?' the captain asks. You see he knows how to go about his work
+without loss of time, even though he has never been very lucky in it.
+
+"'Indeed I have,' the master answers, 'a good, true, lovely girl.'
+
+"'Give her to me,' says the captain, 'for my wife; that is all I ask.'
+
+"The master thinks that is a good deal to ask, but not too much, when
+he looks at the chest again, and he says, joyfully enough: 'You shall
+have her, indeed; I know such a man as you will make a good son-in-law;
+come home with me quickly.'
+
+"So each goes on board his own ship. The master sails first to lead the
+way, and then the red flaming sail springs up again and the black ship
+is off the shore. And the storm howls again too; the waves rise, the
+clouds tear across the sky, and in a minute the ship has passed out of
+sight.
+
+"Listen to the wind around the chimney. It was roaring and whistling a
+minute ago, but now it is not so loud. It grows fainter still, till its
+sound is no more a roar or a whistle, but only the lightest humming of
+a wind, and to me all the wind seems gone now and it is the hum of
+whirling spinning wheels that I hear. And what I see is a room where a
+dozen girls sit spinning and singing songs about their wheels and about
+their lovers. But one among them does not spin. She lets her wheel
+stand idle and only sits and looks at a picture that hangs on the wall.
+It is of a dark man with black hair, a black beard, and deep, piercing
+eyes; it is the captain whom we have seen so much already. The other
+girls laugh at her, say that she is in love with the picture, and ask
+her why she does not sing with them. She cannot sing their happy songs,
+she says. Then they ask her to sing by herself, and she sings them a
+song about the captain. It tells them his story, as we know it already,
+and as she sings they all stop their wheels and begin to gather around
+her, and in spite of all their merriment it moves them at last, as such
+a sad story ought to move anybody.
+
+"And when she has finished they all say, 'Ah, poor fellow, if only some
+good woman would save him from his dreadful lot! But who would do it
+and give up her own life?'
+
+"'I would do it,' she replies, 'and I hope that the winds may blow him
+here, so that I can tell him that I am ready to love him and to save
+him.'
+
+"The others, who are very charming girls, no doubt, but just now not
+quite so noble and resolute as this one, are almost frightened to hear
+her talk so, and when somebody says that her father is coming they all
+slip away and leave her to meet him alone, while they chatter among
+themselves about what a strange girl she is to want to give her life
+for a man whose black hair and piercing eyes she has never even seen
+except in a picture. Her father is the shipmaster whom we saw, as you
+have guessed by this time, and he has brought the stranger captain home
+with him. 'This is my daughter,' he says; 'is she not all and more than
+all that I told you?'
+
+"Then, having always found her, no doubt, a good and obedient child, he
+tells her at once that the captain is to stay with them, and that he
+expects her to be his wife. Some girls do not like to be ordered to
+marry even the men they love; but she is so true and simple and kind
+that she means to love the captain with all her heart, and even her
+father's wish that she shall do so cannot change her. The father thinks
+very wisely that they will get on better without him, so he leaves
+them, and they do get on better at once. First they gaze for a long
+time into each other's eyes, those deep, piercing, sad eyes of the
+captain, and those true, soft, young eyes of the master's daughter.
+Then he thinks that her face is not strange to him, as he remembers,
+dimly at first and then more clearly, that he has seen this face in
+dreams many times, when it was the face of an angel who was to save him
+from his long weariness. And the dreams were not far wrong, for she
+looks into his eyes with no thought for herself, but only: 'This is one
+who has suffered for many years and must suffer for many years more,
+unless I love him and save him.'
+
+"He asks her if she can give herself wholly to him, and she answers
+that, whatever his fate may be and whatever hers, she will take it all
+and will be all his own forever. 'If you knew what it would cost you to
+be true to me,' he says, 'you would shrink away from me and try to save
+yourself.' 'Never,' she answers; 'let it cost what it will, I will be
+true to you till death.'
+
+"I see the shore and the sea again. This time it is near the master's
+house, and the two ships are moored not far apart. The red sails are
+furled, but on the ship there is the little pale blue flame of a
+ghostly watch-fire. The captain comes out of the house and strides up
+and down along the shore. All the gladness that he had when we saw him
+last is gone--no, not all, but there is doubt and perplexity with it
+now. The fact is that the captain has learned something now that he
+never knew before. All these weary years he has been longing and hoping
+for some good woman to love him, but he has never thought much about
+loving any good woman. What right had he to expect anything when he
+meant to give nothing? He has never thought of this before, but he
+thinks of it now. And the reason is that now, when he has found a woman
+who loves him and will gladly die for him, he finds too that he loves
+her as well; and if he loves her, how can he let her die for him? She
+is so good and unselfish that perhaps it would be a happiness to her to
+do it, but it is the more to his credit that he does not think of that.
+
+"That is why he paces up and down the shore and fights hard with
+himself. Only think of it. For all these many years, while other men
+were living happy lives and growing old, and their children and their
+grand-children were growing old too, the angry winds and waves have
+driven him about and have given him no rest; now this woman could save
+him, but his love tells him that he ought to save her instead. Can he
+save her and go back again to the rage of the storm and live in it
+forever, live in it till doomsday? Oh, it is a hard fight, but at last
+he answers yes; all that he has borne so long he can bear still longer.
+The sea shall swallow his ship and cast it up again, the clouds shall
+sink down upon it, the winds shall drive it over the whole ocean, but
+she shall not die because of him. And it will not be with him quite as
+it was before; now he will remember through all the hundreds of years
+that are to come that she loved him once, he will think of her always,
+and thinking of her he will wait for doomsday.
+
+"I see him go on board his ship again; he is calling to his men; they
+are hoisting the sails; see the red flame spring up again. The storm
+comes again too. Look at the black smoke that is like flying clouds,
+and hear the wind up there around the chimney. But now out of her
+father's house comes the master's daughter. She sees the ship speeding
+away, and in an instant she knows all the reason; she knows it because
+she would have done the same if she had been the captain. Then she runs
+to a high rock that stands out into the sea; she calls through the loud
+wind that drowns her voice that she will come to him and will be true
+to him till death, and then she leaps from the rock into the rough,
+raging waves. But look; the waves that very instant are rough and
+raging no more; the sea is all still; the clouds are gone, and the wind
+is silent. The ship with the blood-red sails is sinking out of sight.
+See how the red flame dies down and the black hull is breaking to
+pieces. And right where it was I can see the captain and the master's
+daughter rising out of the sea together, with a beautiful light around
+them, as beautiful as all the colors of our fire can make it. They seem
+to float along the water, away and away, and I think the good fairies
+of the sea must be taking them to Fairyland or to some pleasant island,
+where they will always live happily together."
+
+The fire blazed up brighter than ever for a minute and then dropped
+down again. "Come here to the window," I said; "see how the fog has all
+cleared away and has left the moon shining down upon the sea. What a
+broad track of light it makes from the shore here where it is nearest
+us, away off to the edge of the sky! How the little flecks and sparkles
+of light run and dance and chase one another, and how happy and glad
+they seem, riding the little ripples of waves in the light of the moon!
+Are they the sea fairies, dancing and playing together and calming the
+water, to bring the sailors safe back to their homes, do you think?"
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE POTION
+
+
+There was a beautiful moon and everybody said it was a pity to have it
+wasted. So indeed it was, and everybody asked everybody else what we
+should do to prevent its being wasted. A few, who had made the best
+possible use of more moons than the rest of us, were in favor of simply
+sitting on the rocks and looking at the moon and the sea under it. That
+was really not a bad plan at all. When you sit with somebody beside you
+and the rest of the party not too near, on a high rock that runs far
+out into the water, and look at the big white moon and the soft colors
+of the sky around it, and then at the stretch of water, unobstructed to
+the horizon, with the moon's reflection broken by the waves into a
+million dancing sparkles, when you turn and look toward the beach,
+seeing the black surges rolling swiftly up to the shore and then
+breaking into gleaming foam, but still plunging on, like banks of
+tumbling snow--then indeed you can think of wonderful things and say
+wonderful things if you like. But perhaps you may prefer to say nothing
+at all, and that is a very good and pleasant way too, for at such a
+time it seems really not quite right to talk unless you can talk in
+poetry, and that is not easy to do, no matter how much you may feel
+like doing it.
+
+These people who had made the best of so many moons knew all this, but
+some of the others thought that this moon was worthy of a greater
+effort and a more deep-laid plan. All the things that are usually done
+on moonlight nights were rejected one by one. Then one of those strange
+persons who are always noticing things said, not at all as if he
+thought it had anything to do with the subject, that there was an
+uncommon quantity of wood scattered along the shore. Then it was
+decided, just because nothing better could be thought of, that there
+should be a bonfire down on the shore, and nothing else, except the
+moon. So in the forenoon the daily bathing party started for the shore
+a little earlier than usual, and instead of spending our extra time in
+lying on our backs with the sun in our eyes, in the hope of getting
+sunburned, we spent it in gathering wood for the fire.
+
+Picking up driftwood for a bonfire is not very easy work, but there
+were so many of us that we soon had two good piles, one for the fire at
+the start and one to feed it as it burned. Among the wood there were
+two whole barrels, and one of them had had tar in it, so we were sure
+of a splendid fire. Then we all went home, and after it was dark we all
+came back again. The fire was lighted; the bright-colored flames of the
+driftwood played together and grew and streamed up above our heads,
+crackled and roared and sent up torrents of black smoke mixed with
+golden sparks. For a little while nobody was tired of feeding it and
+watching it, but by and by we let a few attend to keeping it up, while
+the rest of us made a very little fire among the stones and let it
+quickly die down to a bed of red embers for toasting marshmallow drops.
+The man up at the village who keeps the shop with everything in it, and
+the post-office, must have a notion that city people live chiefly on
+marshmallow drops, that is, if he ever lets himself be troubled by any
+notions except those he keeps to sell.
+
+After that the most of the people strolled away along the shore. Some
+said they wanted to see how the fire looked from a distance, and
+others, I think, were trying to get nearer to the moon. At last the
+little girl and I were left alone. We made cushions of folded coats and
+shawls, and sat leaning against a big rock, looking at the fire.
+
+"We scarcely need the fire to-night," I said; "if we try a little we
+can see pictures through it and all around it, as well as in it. See
+that big, black rock, that stands almost in the edge of the water, like
+an old castle, built upon the shore. Then look away across the water to
+the island over yonder. I see a ship coming from the island toward our
+shore; perhaps you do not see it yet. As it gets nearer I can see a
+knight standing in the bow. He is a big, bold, fine-looking fellow, and
+he is all in black armor. The ship reaches the shore and the knight and
+his men go toward the castle, where the King lives, while the King and
+all his court come out to meet him. Some people may tell you, or you
+may some time find out for yourself, that this King is a very wicked
+man, mean, cruel, and treacherous. Perhaps he is, but all I can tell
+you is that now he does not seem so to me; on the contrary he seems as
+kind and generous as you could wish.
+
+"The knight in the black armor marches proudly up to him and tells him
+that he has been sent by his brother, the King of the island over there
+from which he came, to get the tribute which the king here has owed to
+him for years, and it must be paid, or else the king or some one of his
+knights must fight with him to see whether it shall be paid or not. The
+black knight is such a big man and looks like such a good fighter that
+the men about the King seem to think it would be a pretty good thing to
+pay the tribute and let him go home with it. Not one of them says a
+word about wanting to fight with him, for a little while; but by and
+by, when all the rest have had a fair chance, a young man comes forward
+and asks the King if he may try. He is as big a man as the black knight
+himself, and as handsome and brave looking as any you ever dreamed of
+seeing, but he is so young that he cannot have fought many battles, and
+one would think that he would be afraid to set himself against the big
+black knight, unless one looked at his face, as I do, and saw that he
+could not possibly be afraid of anything."
+
+"Is he braver than the one that killed the dragon?" the child asked.
+
+"Why, no, I suppose not; nobody could be braver than he, because, you
+know, he could not learn what fear meant, and did not even know whether
+it was something to feel or something to eat or something to wear, but
+this young knight is just as brave as there is any need for anybody to
+be, and when he asks the King to let him try to beat the black knight,
+all the other knights say at once, 'By all means, let him try,' and
+they are really quite eager about it, and almost all of them change
+their minds about giving the tribute. So the King says that he may
+fight the battle if he will, and he puts on his armor, which is all of
+green, and mounts his horse.
+
+"The black knight is on his horse too, and they ride far apart and then
+face each other and hold their long spears before them, ready for the
+battle. All the people stand far off at the sides, the heralds blow
+their trumpets, and the two knights run together with all the speed of
+their horses. The points of their spears are down and they are both
+well aimed, but each catches the other's spear fairly in the middle of
+his shield, and they rush together so hard that there is a great crash,
+and both the knights and both the horses fall to the ground with a
+terrible clatter of arms. But the knights are both on their feet again
+in a moment, and are falling upon each other with their swords, cutting
+and slashing and warding and advancing and retreating, till it is hard
+to tell which is the black knight and which the green, or whether they
+are not both black and both green. First one seems to be getting a
+little the better of the fight and then the other. The black knight is
+better trained, but the green knight is so much younger and fresher
+that he keeps his strength better, and by and by the black knight sees
+that he is surely gaining a little. Then he rushes upon the green
+knight and fights with all his strength and all his skill, and at last
+he gives him a wound on the shoulder. Then the green knight sees that
+if he is ever to do anything in this fight he must do it now, and he
+uses all his strength and all his skill too, and he brings down such a
+blow with his sword on the head of the black knight that it cuts
+through the helmet, and the edge of the sword is broken, and with
+another clash and clatter of arms the black knight falls to the ground.
+
+"The black knight's men run to him and carry him to his ship, and sail
+away as quickly as they can toward their island. I can see them all the
+way, though it is a little dark out there, in spite of the moon, and I
+can see everything they do after they get there; I have to, you know,
+or it would spoil the story. They carry him to the King's castle, and
+the Queen and her daughter, who know all about medicines, and even some
+things that are stronger than medicines, dress his wound and nurse him
+and watch him day and night. But it is all of no use; nothing can cure
+the black knight's wound, and so he dies; but in dressing the wound the
+princess has found in it a little piece of steel that was broken from
+the edge of the green knight's sword.
+
+"Now you ought to know, before we go any farther, that this princess is
+probably altogether the most beautiful princess that you ever heard a
+story about."
+
+"Oh, that's the way they always are," said the little girl; "is she
+beautifuller than the one that had the fire all round her?"
+
+"Perhaps not, but she was not a princess, you know; she was a goddess
+till her father kissed her, and then she was nothing at all till her
+lover came and kissed her, and after that she was a woman, which was
+altogether the best thing she could possibly be. But when we first saw
+her she was a goddess, and we have a right to expect more of her than
+of a princess. So I say again that this is quite the most beautiful
+princess that you have ever heard a story about, and you must believe
+it, if you please, or I shall not tell you any more about her."
+
+"Oh, I believe anything you say," said the child, "but where is the
+green knight?"
+
+"He is still here on the shore, in the King's castle, and his wound is
+a very bad one too, and after all the doctors have tried to cure it and
+have failed, one of them says that it can never be cured at all except
+in the country of the black knight who gave it to him. Now it is not
+very safe for the knight to go over to that island, where so many
+people would probably be glad to kill him for killing the black knight,
+so he disguises himself as much as he can before he goes. And he goes
+straight to the King's castle, just as the black knight did, and the
+Queen and the princess take care of him just as they took care of the
+black knight, only this time they have better luck, and in a little
+while he gets well.
+
+"But long before he gets well the princess, who is watching by his
+side, sees the sword that he brought lying near by, and having nothing
+better to do, she looks first at the jewels in the hilt and then slowly
+draws the sword out of its scabbard to let her eye run along the
+polished blade, with its smooth, sharp edge. And then her eye quickly
+comes to a break in the smooth, sharp edge, and in an instant she
+thinks of the splinter of a sword edge that she found in her uncle's
+wound. At that she quickly drops the sword. Then she gets the splinter,
+which she has kept, and finds that it just fits the broken place in the
+sword, so she knows that this knight whom she is nursing and curing of
+his wound is the one who killed her uncle when he was fighting for her
+father. For a moment she thinks that she will kill him, and she lifts
+the sword above him, but when she sees the helpless look in his eyes
+she has not the heart to do it, and she lets the sword fall again. If
+the truth were told, I think she is already a little in love with him,
+and if he were any kind of knight except a green one, he would be in
+love with her too.
+
+"If he only would fall in love now it might save a good deal of trouble
+afterwards, but because of his habit of wearing green clothes and green
+armor, or for some other reason, he does not, and when his wound is
+quite cured he sails cheerfully away again, just as if it were an
+everyday affair to be nursed by a queen and a princess. He sails back
+here to our own shore now, to the King's castle, and the King and
+everybody else are as glad as possible to see him. He tells them all
+about the Queen and the princess, and how beautiful she is, for it
+seems he did notice that, till by and by, when the knights of the court
+find that he is talking about her only in the way he would talk about a
+picture that pleased him, they whisper to the King that such a
+princess, who is so beautiful, and knows so much about curing wounds,
+would no doubt make a good queen, and they advise him to send for her
+and marry her. The green knight himself hears these whispers, and he
+says, 'Yes, by all means; I will go and get her; she will be glad to
+come, and her father and mother will be delighted to have her.' Did you
+ever hear of such absurd conduct from a young man dressed in green?
+
+"Away he sails again, over to the island, and when he tells his errand
+the King and the Queen are delighted indeed. The princess is not so
+much delighted as some young women might be at the prospect of being
+married to a king, but she pretends to be very well pleased and says
+that she will go. This time it is she who makes a sad mistake, for if
+she would only say, right out aloud, 'I do not want to be married to
+this King; I want to be married to the green knight,' again it might
+save a good deal of trouble afterwards. She need not say it to him, but
+she might say it to her mother, and if he did not love her the Queen
+would know very well how to make him, as you shall see by and by.
+Still, if there were no trouble there would be no story, so we might
+better not complain, as long as the trouble will not be ours. So the
+princess sails away with the knight, and the Queen, before she goes,
+like a careful mother, gives her a little box of medicines such as she
+uses herself. That is to say, medicines and other things. One of the
+other things is a poison that kills anybody who drinks it, in just
+about a minute, and it looks and tastes just like wine. Another is a
+stranger mixture yet, for when a man and a woman drink it together it
+makes them, from that instant, love each other as long as they live,
+more than they love life or honor or their country or anything or
+anybody else in the world. And this, too, looks and tastes just like
+wine. It would not be easy to find two more dangerous drinks than these
+together.
+
+"I see the knight and the princess now on board the ship, coming here
+to our shore. The knight stands near the helmsman, looking away at the
+sea and the sky, and thinking of nothing more sensible than how glad
+his King will be when he sees his bride, and how much his King will
+thank him for finding for him and bringing to him such a lovely
+princess. But the princess, who is sitting far away from him, at the
+other end of the ship, is thinking a great deal, and of such bitter
+things that she does not look at the beautiful sea and sky at all. The
+end of half her thoughts is that in a very little while now she will
+have to be the wife of a king whom she has never seen and never wants
+to see, because she loves the green knight, and the end of the other
+half of her thoughts is that she hates the knight who has brought her
+to this, as she could never in the world hate anybody except one whom
+she loved.
+
+"And this is how her thoughts come, for you know I can see thoughts
+just as plainly as I can see castles and ships and battles: she thinks
+of her uncle, whom she loved, who fought for her father and for her
+country, who was wounded, and whose life she could not save; she thinks
+of the unknown knight who came to her, wounded too, whom she nursed and
+did save; she thinks how she began to love him, for the most of us love
+better those whom we help than those who help us; she thinks of that
+time when she saw his sword and knew that it was he who had killed her
+uncle, how her anger rose against him for that and because he had dared
+to come to her for help, how she had been about to kill him, and how
+she saw that helpless look in his eyes and had not the heart to do it.
+It is now that her thoughts grow bitter, for she thinks how he went
+away again and never dreamed of loving her for healing his wound and
+saving his life, and then sparing his life and loving him, when she
+ought to hate him and kill him, because he killed her uncle. She is
+beautiful enough to be loved, she thinks. Then comes a maddening
+thought of how this man whom she loved not only cared no more for her
+than for one of her father's dogs, but himself came back to ask her
+hand for another. This seems an insult to her and it makes her whole
+soul burn. She wishes she had killed him when she had his sword in her
+hands, and the madness fills her mind and burns her soul till she
+resolves that she will kill him now.
+
+"She not only thinks all this but says it to her maid, and she orders
+her to take the poison out of the box of medicines that her mother gave
+her, and put it into a goblet, and she says that the knight shall drink
+some of it and that she will drink the rest herself, and so punish her
+enemy and be rid of the King who is to be her husband, for she will
+gladly die rather than be married to him. Of course this throws the
+poor maid into a terrible fright, for she is not a princess, and
+poisoning and cutting off heads, and such things seem like serious
+matters to her, so she would gladly save the knight and her mistress
+too, if she could. If you were in her place I know very well what you
+would do. You would give the princess some wine instead of the poison,
+and before she could find out what you had done, she and the knight
+would be on shore and would be saved. But this poor girl is so
+frightened that she can think of nothing to do but to give her mistress
+and the knight the love drink instead of the poison.
+
+"The princess calls the knight to her and frowns upon him as dreadfully
+as she knows how. Can you think how a bunch of sweet, fresh, red and
+white roses would look if it should get terribly angry? Well, that is
+about the way the princess frowns. But it is not her fault. She was not
+made to frown. She tells the knight that he has been very cruel and
+very untrue to her, and that she ought to have killed him for killing
+her uncle; but now she says she will forgive him, and to show that they
+are friends she asks him to drink this wine with her. And now you may
+see how brave this green knight really is, for he sees well enough that
+she does not forgive him at all and means to kill him; yet he takes the
+goblet from her hand without a tremor of his own and drinks. Then she
+snatches the goblet from him and drinks the rest herself, and cries,
+'Now we shall both die; I have my revenge upon you, and you shall not
+marry me to your King!'
+
+"But, oh, it is the drink of love, and instead of dying the two stand
+and gaze at each other as if they could never gaze enough, then they
+stretch their arms toward each other, and so they meet, and now,
+whatever happens to either of them, they must always love each other as
+long as they live, more than they love life or honor or their country
+or anything or anybody else in the world.
+
+"How they ever get on shore I don't know, but I do know that when they
+are there they make another great mistake, for they hide from the King
+that they love each other, and they let him think still that the
+princess means to be married to him, when I am sure she can mean
+nothing of the kind. He is a very good sort of King, who wants
+everybody to be as happy as possible, and he never has seen this
+princess before, so what can he really care for her? If they would only
+tell him I am sure he would be glad to help them, instead of standing
+in their way, but they are just as foolish as they have both been all
+along, and they say nothing about it.
+
+"The princess is in the garden of the castle with her maid and they are
+waiting for the knight to come. The King and all his men have ridden a-
+hunting. It is night, and a torch burns at the castle door; at last we
+can see something in the fire. The knight will not come till they put
+out the torch, for that is the signal they have arranged, and they will
+not put out the torch till the hunting party is far away. You see they
+are still so absurdly secret about it! The maid tells the princess that
+she might better not put out the torch at all, for a treacherous friend
+of the knight has watched them, suspects their love, and has told the
+King; that the hunting party is only a trap, and that the King will
+soon come back. If it were a real hunt it would be strange for the
+green knight himself not to go, for he is the best huntsman in the
+whole country. All this is quite true; for the King, kind and generous
+as he is, does not like to be deceived any better than anybody else,
+and he wants people to keep the promises that they make to him.
+
+"But the princess is in such haste to see the green knight again that
+she will not heed the maid's warning. She sends her up to the tower to
+watch, as soon as she thinks the hunters are far enough away, and then
+she throws the torch down upon the ground and puts it out. Then the
+green knight comes. But they have scarcely sat down on the grassy bank
+to tell each other how much they love each other, and to forget all
+about the poor King, when the maid cries out from the tower that the
+huntsmen are coming back, the knight's old servant comes running with
+his sword drawn to his master and begs him to save himself, and in a
+minute they all come, the treacherous friend of the green knight
+leading the way, and the King next after him. The knight is standing
+before the princess, not thinking of himself, and the traitor, who
+could never match him for a moment in a fair fight, rushes upon him and
+wounds him, but before he can do more the King himself holds him back.
+The old servant raises the knight from the ground where he has fallen,
+drags him quickly to the shore and puts him in a ship that is there,
+and once more they sail away.
+
+[Illustration: "AS IF THEY COULD NEVER GAZE ENOUGH."]
+
+"The rock there by the water is no longer the castle of the King. It is
+the green knight's castle now, in another country, across the sea. The
+old servant has brought the knight here, away from his enemies, to try
+to heal his wound. All his care seems useless. The poor knight has all
+the time grown worse. But his faithful old servant has remembered who
+it was that cured another wound of his before, and he has sent a ship
+with secret messengers to bring the princess if they can. That he may
+know as soon as he sees the ship whether the princess is on board, he
+has told the sailors to hoist white sails if they bring her with them,
+and black sails if they do not. He is watching now for the ship to come
+back.
+
+"It is the court-yard of the castle that I see, and a sweet, calm,
+lovely picture it is. The knight and his servant have been so long away
+that the place has been neglected, but it is all the prettier for that.
+The grass has grown long, and, as the light winds breathe upon it, it
+sways and sinks and rises in waves, as if it tried to be like the sea
+down there below it. The gray old walls and ramparts of the castle have
+bright green moss upon them, and from the crannies hang little plants
+and vines. High up, where a rough stone projects a little from the
+tower, a cluster of bluebells swings in the breeze and nods to the
+other flowers and the grass and the trees down below. Are the bluebells
+trying to say to the grass that up there on their airy lookout they can
+see away over the shining water, that the ship is not yet in sight, but
+that they know she will come? Beyond and away, clear to the edge of the
+sky, just as it is here before us now, lies the sea. Smooth and
+peaceful it is, as if it were resting all through this calm day. Over
+it all the sun is sending a flood of light, fifty times as bright as
+the light of this splendid moon of ours. But now and then it is dimmed
+a little, for far away on the sea lies a strip of shade, the shadow of
+a cloud; slowly it moves toward the land, as the cloud sails through
+the blue sky, and as it comes it is seen plainer and moves faster, till
+the shadow reaches the shore and rests for an instant on the castle and
+the court-yard, and then it passes away into the land and everything is
+sunny again.
+
+"Yet in all this light and peaceful beauty there is something that
+seems like sadness. In the court-yard, on his couch, lies the knight,
+in the cool shade. He does not know where he is, and he does not know
+his servant, who stands beside him, with the tears in his faithful old
+eyes, but he must know that he is in a beautiful place. Does everything
+in the place know that he is here, too, and feel sad to see him lying
+sick and wounded and weak and weary? The sun veils his face oftener
+than he does on some of our bright days, and when there is no cloud he
+shines with a soft, mellow light, the sea throws shades of purple over
+its blue and silver, and its waves break against the shore with only a
+soft little sound, and a sort of hushed song that is like a moan and is
+like a lullaby too. You can hear it down there among the pebbles around
+the rock. The bluebells swing softly, as if they were afraid to ring
+out aloud and disturb the sleeping knight. The hard walls look softer
+for their coverings of moss; the grass waves slowly and bends toward
+the wounded man, seeming to listen to his breathing. A shepherd leans
+over the rampart and plays a soft, sad, sleepy little air on his pipe.
+'Is the knight awake?' he calls to the servant.
+
+"'No,' the servant answers, 'and unless the princess comes I fear he
+will never wake; watch for the ship.'
+
+"'I will watch,' the shepherd says, 'and if I see the ship I will play
+a lively tune on my pipe to tell you of it.'
+
+"The knight begins to wake and stir; he asks where he is, and the
+servant tells him that he is at his own castle. He has been dreaming of
+the princess, and the servant says, 'I have sent the ship for her; she
+will come to-day.' But the knight is so weak that he cannot understand
+or talk of one thing very long, and he falls half asleep again and
+dreams of the princess, and because he has heard of a ship he dreams of
+other ships. He has his old wound now and is lying, just as he lies
+here, in that ship which bore him the first time toward the princess;
+now she is with him and his face grows lighter. She is looking at his
+sword; she raises it again, as she did so long ago, to kill him; but
+she sees again the helpless look in his eyes and has not the heart to
+do it, and she lets the sword fall again. He is on a second ship,
+sailing toward the princess to bring her for the King's bride; now the
+ship is sailing back and they are together on the deck. She holds out
+to him that goblet of strange wine; they both drink, they gaze into
+each other's eyes, the dream is too happy to last, and he awakes and
+cries, 'Has the ship come? Can you not see her yet?'
+
+"'Not yet,' the servant answers; 'but she must come soon.'
+
+"The knight is in the garden of the castle--the other castle--waiting
+for the princess to put out the torch, that he may come to her. The
+torch falls upon the ground, he runs toward the place, and they are
+together yet again. It is another happy dream that cannot stay. 'Is the
+ship nowhere in sight?'
+
+"Before the servant can answer he hears the merry tune from the
+shepherd's pipe and knows that the ship is coming now, indeed. He looks
+away across the sea and tells his master how swiftly it flies over the
+water toward them, with its white sails, for the sails are white and
+the princess is on board. The time seems long to the knight and his
+servant, yet it is really short, for the wind is fair. The ship comes
+nearer and nearer, it passes the dangerous reef, it is so near that the
+servant can see the faces of the princess and the helmsman and the
+sailors. Now it is at the very shore and the princess is at the gate.
+Ah, it was not medicines that the knight needed. With the very
+knowledge that the princess is there, he raises himself from his couch
+and walks toward the gate. Then his little strength fails again and he
+would fall, but the princess herself catches him in her arms and holds
+him. This time it is no dream.
+
+"She leads him back to the couch, he sinks upon it, and she bends over
+him. But suddenly the shepherd runs to the rampart and cries that
+another ship is coming, the King's ship. Are the King's men coming then
+to carry back the princess, perhaps to kill the knight? The servant
+calls the men of the castle and they try to barricade and guard the
+gate. But they are too late; the King's men and the King himself break
+through the barriers and are in the courtyard. The very first of them
+is the knight's treacherous friend; the old servant instantly cuts him
+down with his sword, and there is one good stroke at least. Then the
+King calls to all to hold their hands and to strike no more; he has
+come only to give the princess to the knight. He has heard of the love
+drink, and knows at last that they were not to blame for what they did,
+and that they never meant to be false to him.
+
+"But still the knight lies there on his couch and the princess kneels
+by his side and bends over him, and neither of them speaks or moves."
+
+"And will the knight get well again?" the little girl asked.
+
+"Let us not try to find out any more now," I said. "The knight and the
+princess are both here, and I know that they are happier together than
+they have ever been before. That is enough, is it not?"
+
+All at once there were voices behind us, three voices at least.
+
+"Hello, there! who's attending to the fire? You're letting it all go
+out, and there's plenty of wood left."
+
+"What are you two doing here all alone? Don't you know you'll catch
+your death o' cold sitting here so long?"
+
+"Are there any marshmallows left?"
+
+"No," said the little girl, answering the last question, "we don't care
+about marshmallows any way," and I really believe just then she thought
+she did not care about them, though usually she likes them almost as
+well as anybody.
+
+
+
+
+THE MINSTREL KNIGHT
+
+
+The little girl stayed at the seashore till the middle of the autumn.
+That is the way sensible people do, when they can, and I have worked
+much in vain if I have not shown by this time that this little girl is
+a sensible little person. The spring is very lovely, to be sure, and of
+course we all love it. I should be the last one to say anything against
+it. But to me the most beautiful time of the whole beautiful year is
+the early autumn. The heat and the work and the worry of the year are
+over, and the clear, rich, golden good of it all is left to be enjoyed.
+The flowers are not pink and pale blue any more; they are of deep,
+splendid yellow and red and purple. The golden-rod and the asters are
+lords of flowers, and the cardinal is their high-priest, while if you
+will have something that is delicate and modest, there is the fringed
+gentian, and that shows, too, how healthy and brave and free it is by
+keeping no company with dark shadows, and opening only when the bright
+sun shines full upon it.
+
+But of the things that are best in the autumn, the best above all
+others is the sea. It has been lying quiet and restful all summer, and
+now it awakes and begins to move and to show the strength and the
+freedom of its glorious life. As you stand upon the shore and look at
+it, it draws itself away from you and away from the land as if it were
+done with it forever; then it pauses, and in a moment begins to come
+back. Up and up the beach it marches with a majestic will that nothing
+else in the world is like; as it comes it lifts itself higher and
+higher; then the wave leaps into the air and its crest is turned to
+emerald as the sunlight strikes through it for the pause of another
+instant, there is a roll, a mad plunge, the spray dashes high above
+your head, the foam floats and flies up the beach to your very feet,
+the hollow rumble of the water sounds fainter and farther along the
+sands, and the ocean draws itself back away from you and away from the
+land. Its colors are different, too. Before it had all sorts of
+fanciful hues and shades, pale green and blue, silver, violet, almost
+rose sometimes, the colors of summer dreams. Now the dreaming time is
+over. The green of the wave-crests is luminous, the white and the blue
+have the gleam of polished steel, the violet and the rose are turned to
+deep, rich purple. The sea is not cold, harsh, and cruel yet, but it is
+free, bold, and majestic.
+
+All this I knew because I remembered it, not because I saw it, for I
+had been back in the city a long time. The fire was lighted again and I
+had sat before it often, thinking of the driftwood fire away down
+there, with the little girl sitting before it, seeing pictures in it
+for herself, perhaps, and listening to the low sound of the sea, coming
+up through the still evening air. But one night she came and sat with
+me again, and once more we both looked into the same fire. "I believe I
+can almost see pictures myself now," she said.
+
+"Can you? And what do you see in the fire now?"
+
+"Oh, I can see a prince and a princess--and a knight--and a lovely
+goddess, like the one that had the apples--and a cave, like the one
+where the dragon lived--"
+
+"And don't you see the dragon himself? Where is he?"
+
+"No, there isn't any dragon; that would be too much like the other
+story."
+
+"But you must not mind that. There are only a few good stories
+altogether, and the most we can do, as I told you once before, is to
+tell them over and over again in different ways."
+
+"But I don't want any dragon in this one. Now you tell me what they all
+do, the goddess and the knight, and the prince and the princess, and
+what the cave is for."
+
+"Very well, I will try. First I see the knight. He is riding along upon
+his horse, through the forests, over the hills and across the valleys.
+It is a lovely day of summer. When he comes to the top of a hill, he
+sees the country lying before him and all around him, deep green with
+woods and pastures and paler green where the grain is ripening. Here
+and there, too, it is sprinkled with tiny dots of red, where the
+poppies grow thick in a field, and there are spots that are almost blue
+with cornflowers. A silver ribbon of a river winds through it, and the
+sight of it is lost among the blue mountains. As he rides down into a
+valley the branches wave above him and break the sunshine that falls
+upon the road and the grass beside it. The flecks of light and the
+patches of shade tremble and waver and dart across and across the way,
+as if they were weaving a robe for the earth, of gold and brown and
+green. The air is full of the smell of the flowers, a brook makes a
+soft, cheery little noise, and from the pastures comes the sleepy sound
+of sheep-bells.
+
+"The knight is riding toward the castle of the prince. He is a
+minstrel, as well as a knight, and at the castle he will meet other
+minstrels who are his friends, and they are all to sing for a prize
+which the prince has offered. There is as much happiness in the heart
+of the knight as in everything around him, for he loves the prince's
+daughter, and he knows that she loves him. Besides this she is to give
+the prize to the one who wins it, and with his mind full of gladness
+and thoughts of her, he feels sure that he can win.
+
+"As he rides thus the evening falls. The moon comes up, and from the
+hills the country stretches darkly away all around, with the silver
+ribbon of the river still winding through it. The shade is so deep in
+the valleys that he has to ride through them slowly. The robe of the
+earth now is all of deep gray and silver. The smell of the flowers is
+stronger and sweeter than before, the brooks sound louder, and the
+sheep bells are silent. The knight's thoughts just now are wandering
+away from the princess, and he is thinking of the fame that he hopes to
+win as a minstrel, how he will gain this prize and many other prizes,
+how kings will send for him to come to their courts, that they may hear
+his songs, how he will grow great and rich, and how his name will live
+on after he is dead.
+
+"As he thinks of these things, suddenly he sees a strange form before
+him in the valley. It is like a woman, wonderfully beautiful,
+marvellously, magically beautiful. Something more than the moonlight
+seems to rest upon her and to show him her face with its deep eyes and
+soft cheeks, her movements, so graceful and gentle that it seems as if
+she did not move herself at all, but were just stirred and swayed by
+the little breezes. A rosy light shines from her face and around her
+dark hair. All about her are nymphs, or fairies, dancing and gliding
+and scattering roses for her to walk upon. It seems really quite
+needless to do that, for she appears rather to float and move in the
+air and to rest on the flower-perfumed wind than to stand or walk upon
+the ground. Now a knight who was also a minstrel could not possibly
+make any mistake about such a person as this, and he knows at once that
+she is the very Goddess of Love and Beauty."
+
+"Is she the one that had the apples?" the little girl asked.
+
+"No, not quite the same. She is one something like her, yet a good deal
+different."
+
+"Is she Venus then?"
+
+"Yes, you have guessed just right, and so at last somebody in our story
+has a name. But she is not altogether like the Venus that you have
+heard about so many times before. Some people used to believe that
+after the old gods whom you know so well had lost their rule on Mount
+Olympus, they went to live inside the mountains and under the ground,
+and that they were not kind to men any more, but always did harm,
+whenever they were able to do anything. Now, for myself, I don't quite
+see how this could be, because you know we have felt so sure that we
+saw some of them up in the sky sometimes. Yet now that I see Venus
+here, it does seem to me as if there were something in the story after
+all, and I believe it would be better for the knight if he had never
+seen her at all. If he were thinking of the princess at the time I do
+not believe he would look twice at Venus. No, I am sure he would not
+even see her once.
+
+"But since he is not thinking of the princess, but only of what a great
+man he would be if he could make his songs seem as wonderful to
+everybody else as they seem to himself, it is not surprising that he is
+delighted by such a vision, and it is not surprising, either, when the
+goddess and her nymphs beckon to him and then glide away as if they
+wanted him to follow them, that he gets off his horse and does follow
+them. They move along so fast that he cannot keep up with them, and
+soon he cannot even see them, but it is still easy for him to follow.
+For everywhere they go the strangest flowers spring up under their feet
+and make a pathway to lead him. They are huge, bright flowers, cup-
+shaped and star-shaped and sun-shaped. Flowers of such wonderful form
+and size, and such gorgeous colors the knight never saw before. Some of
+them seem to be made of hammered gold, and some of silver; some have
+stamens of precious stones, and some look like clear crystal, blood-
+red, deep purple, or orange, as if they were cut from solid gems; some
+of them have petals like flames, that shimmer and glow and are
+reflected by the others; the leaves are all glistening emerald and they
+are sprinkled with pearls like drops of evening dew. The stems twine
+about like serpents, and they seem to the knight to move and turn about
+to show him all their magic splendor. Some of them, with coiling
+tendrils, like gold wire, sway toward him as if they would catch him
+and hold him, others dance and wave about on their stems and twinkle as
+the other stars do, up above the trees, as if they were laughing and
+mocking at him, and still others bow and bend away from him and beckon
+him on. The whole of the fire is scarcely enough to show me this
+strange garden. A pale, ghostly light rises from all the flowers and
+hovers over the path. The knight would stop to pick some of them, but
+those before him seem always more beautiful than those close at hand,
+and, besides, he is eager to follow the goddess. So on he hurries till
+he sees before him a way straight into the side of the mountain and
+within a great glare of light. If he would only think of the princess
+now, for one instant! But he goes straight on into the mountain, and
+the way shuts behind him, and outside the magic flowers are gone, and
+there is nothing but the soft grass, the whispering trees, the dark
+sky, with the stars, and the calm night.
+
+[Illustration: "THE STRANGEST FLOWERS SPRING UP UNDER THEIR FEET."]
+
+"Do you see how very wrong it is for the knight to go away after the
+goddess into the mountain? When people let themselves be led away like
+that by fairies and goddesses it is usually a long time before they get
+back. A knight like this one, who is a minstrel as well, ought to know
+all about such things, and I dare say he does. He must have heard of
+men who went to such places and saw beautiful and wonderful sights, and
+feasted and danced till they thought that they had been away from their
+homes for a day, or a week, and then, when they went back to them,
+found that they had really been gone for years, perhaps for hundreds of
+years, and that all their friends were dead. He ought to think of his
+friends, the other knights and minstrels, who will be grieved when they
+meet and he is not with them. For his own sake he ought to know better
+than to run into strange and dangerous places just because they look
+pleasant. More than all, he ought to think of the princess. If he does
+not care for the prize of his song any more for itself he should care
+for her who is to give it. He should remember how much she loves him,
+little as he deserves it. She will not forget him as he does her. When
+she waits and waits for him and he does not come she will believe that
+he is dead, and she will cry her pretty eyes out. She will never think
+that he has gone away from her to visit a goddess of love and beauty
+who lives in a cave.
+
+"Now I see the cave of the goddess, deep in the mountain. It seems dim
+and misty and confused at first, but gradually I can see it clearer.
+All around the sides and the top are great pendants of gems, like
+icicles, of all sorts of colors, as if the precious stones had once
+been liquid and had run down into the cave and then had frozen into
+crystal. Here and there are diamonds and rubies and opals and emeralds
+as big as your head, set in the roof, and they have some magical way of
+shining all by themselves and light up the whole cave like lamps. The
+ground is covered with flowers like those that made the path to lead
+the knight to the place. A stream of water runs from the cave and is
+fed by fountains in the middle. These fountains are wonderful affairs
+too. Sometimes they throw jets of liquid silver almost to the roof;
+then they fall down and spread out wide in sheets, of the color and the
+brightness of melted gold; again the water rises in little streams that
+twine and weave themselves together like basket-work, and all of deep,
+shining crimson; then the fountains take other fantastic forms and
+other colors, purple or green or orange, but always glowing with light,
+and so they pass to silver and to gold again.
+
+"This is the cave of Venus. It is filled with the nymphs who attend
+her, and they are singing choruses in her praise, and dancing
+wonderful, mazy, mad, delirious dances. They whirl about and around
+alone, in couples, in lines, in circles, and in crowds, their arms
+waving and their hair streaming in the air. Sometimes while they dance
+every one is plainly to be seen, and again their garments surround them
+like clouds, and they are all one waving, streaming, fluttering mass.
+These mists of light robes then are like the fountains, for now they
+are shining white, now red or yellow or green or purple, now all the
+colors together, mixed and blended like broken and tangled rainbows.
+
+"If you could see all that I see here in the fire I think you would be
+delighted with it, for a little while. But how do you suppose the
+minstrel knight likes it? He sits beside the goddess and looks at it
+wearily. He has seen them all so much that walls of gems and streams of
+gold and whirling rainbows do not please him any more. He has been here
+in the cave for a whole year. He sees now how wrong it was for him to
+come, and he is so tired of it all that he is beginning to feel that he
+would rather die than be among these mad pleasures any longer. But he
+cannot do that because nobody ever dies here. When he sees these walls
+of cold crystal, gleaming with the colored light from the great gems,
+he thinks of the broad, lovely country that he once saw, that stretched
+away and ended only at the blue mountains, and of the silver river that
+never changed to blood, or to green fire, with the clear sunlight
+brightening them all.
+
+"If he tries to rest his eyes upon the great, glowing, magic flowers
+that cover the ground, they only make him think of the red poppies that
+shone out from the fields of ripening grain, and of the blue of the
+corn-flowers, and then he tries to think of the perfume from the
+flowers that filled the air after it grew still at evening. There are
+odors here, too, but they are so heavy and sweet that after a time it
+is almost a pain to smell them. He hears the rush and the dash of the
+fountains, and he longs for the low, merry little sound of the brook
+that ran along beside his road. The air here is full of music, the rich
+harmonies of many instruments and the voices of the nymphs who sing
+their choruses to Venus, but his ears are tired of the sounds, and he
+wishes that he might hear only the sleepy tinkle of the sheep-bells,
+chiming with the voice of the brook. But more than everything else he
+thinks of the princess. He remembers now how kind and true she was, and
+how much truer he ought to have been in return than he really was. He
+wonders if she still remembers him, if she thinks him dead, and then
+his heart stops, as he wonders if she herself is dead. Oh, it is a fine
+time now to think of these things! If he had only remembered the
+princess once before, instead of thinking what a great minstrel he was,
+he would never have followed Venus into her cave. Now he can only think
+of that great wrong he did and long for the fresh fields and woods, for
+the air, the sunlight--and the princess.
+
+"Venus, sitting by his side, sees that he is troubled and asks him why.
+He tells her how much he wishes that he might see again the world he
+used to know, and live the life he used to live, and he begs her to let
+him go. She is angry at first. Has she not brought him to live here
+among such delights as no man before ever knew, and is he tired of them
+now, and does he want to escape from them? He can only say that he will
+never forget her or the beautiful things he has seen here, but he can
+never be happy here again, and if she will only let him he must go. At
+last she tells him that he may go. 'But you will not be happy,' she
+says; 'your old friends will scorn you when they know where you have
+been. They will never forgive you for coming here. You will find no
+rest, no help, no hope. Then, when you learn that you can have peace
+nowhere else, come back to me and stay with me forever.'
+
+"All at once the cave, with everything in it, is gone. The knight knows
+how or where it went no more than I. As for him, he does not know that
+he has moved from his place, and as for me, the fire is burning just as
+it did before. Yet now I see him lying on the soft grass of a beautiful
+valley. Above him are the sky and the nodding branches of the trees;
+around are the hills. He sees and he smells the flowers that were lost
+to him so long. The low tinkle of the sheep-bells comes again drowsily
+to his ears. A little way up the hill a shepherd is playing softly on
+his pipe. He picks a flower and smells it, to be sure that it is all
+real. Then the tears come to his eyes as he thinks of all the beauty
+and sweetness of the life that he lost and has found again.
+
+"But now a band of pious pilgrims passes, on the way to Rome. They are
+going to ask the Pope to forgive their sins. The sight of them brings a
+new thought to the knight. It is the thought of his own sin. Now that
+he sees again the sweet loveliness of the world, he feels at last fully
+how wicked it was for him to leave it and all his own duties and his
+friends in it. He is in despair when he thinks that he is no longer
+worthy of the princess, if indeed he ever were. He dares not see her
+again; he dares not ask his friends to be his friends longer; he throws
+himself upon the ground and feels that he has no more a place in this
+happy world.
+
+"At this very moment comes a company of huntsmen riding past. Their
+leader is the prince himself and the rest are the friends of the
+minstrel knight, the very ones with whom he should have sung for the
+prize a year ago. Very glad they are to find him, after thinking him
+dead so long, and they insist that he must come with them and be one of
+them again. He will not go with them. He feels that he is not like them
+any more. His wrong has been so great that he dares not be with brave,
+good men. They urge him, but it is useless. But there is one among
+them, a knight and a minstrel too, who also loves the princess. She
+does not love him, but his own love is so deep and true that he will do
+anything to make her happy. When he finds that nothing else can move
+the stubborn knight he tells him that the princess still loves him,
+that she has grieved for him all the time that he has been lost, and
+that he must come back to them for her sake. He is touched at last. He
+had not dared to ask of her, and now he knows that he may see her
+again, that she could never forget like him, that she will love him and
+forgive him. He cannot resist. He will go.
+
+"They are all in the hall of the prince's castle now. They are to sing
+again for a prize and again the princess is to give it. The prince
+tells them that they must all sing of love. The knight who loves the
+princess hopelessly begins. He sings of his own love, how it is fixed
+upon one who does not love him in return, and how still his love for
+her is all the joy he has, and he would gladly lose the last blood of
+his heart for her. They all cry out that he has sung nobly, except the
+knight from the cave of Venus. He thinks this is a very weak, silly
+kind of love; he sings in a very different way, and he tells them that
+if they want to know what love really is they must go and learn of the
+Goddess of Love.
+
+"They are all filled with horror. They know now where he has been. He
+has left the princess for Venus; he has learned to scorn their knightly
+love; worse than all, it seems to them, he, a Christian man, has passed
+a whole year in the home of a heathen goddess. They declare that he has
+betrayed them in daring to come among them like an honest knight. They
+forget that he refused to come, that he told them he was unworthy of
+them and was too wicked to be one of them, and they almost compelled
+him. So their swords are out to kill him. But the princess, whom he has
+injured a thousand times as much as all of them put together, commands
+them to spare him. He may yet be forgiven, she says, and it is not for
+them to judge. She will pray for him as long as she lives, and God may
+pardon him. At her word they draw back and put up their swords, yet
+they think his guilt too great ever to be forgiven. There can be but
+one only hope for him, says the prince; some of the pilgrims on their
+way to Rome are still in the valley; he must go with them and pray for
+pardon from the Pope.
+
+"Never another pilgrim toiled along the road to Rome feeling such a
+heavy weight of sin to be forgiven as the minstrel knight. He does not
+talk with the others or lighten the way as they do with holy songs. He
+knows not how to suffer enough for his guilt, and to seek out
+punishments for himself is his only content. Some of the pilgrims walk
+where the grass is soft and cool; he chooses the paths that are full of
+stones and thorns. They drink at the springs of cold water; he thirsts
+more than they, but he turns away and lets the noon sun blaze down upon
+his bare head. They find shelter and rest for the night; he lies upon
+the snow of the mountain and sleeps there, if he sleeps at all. When he
+comes near to Italy he fears that the sight of that lovely land will be
+pleasing to his eyes, and so he has himself led blindfold on to Rome.
+
+"The Pope sits upon his throne, and before him come all who seek for
+pardon. He forgives them, blesses them, and sends them away. At last
+comes the minstrel knight. He throws himself on the stones before the
+feet of the Pope and tells the story of all the wrong that he has done.
+The Pope listens and is filled with horror, as the prince and the
+knights were before, and there is no princess here to say one word of
+love or mercy. 'There is no hope for you,' he answers, 'no pardon, no
+hope. Your guilt is too deep and black. As soon shall this naked staff
+I hold bear flowers and leaves as one like you find forgiveness or
+mercy.'
+
+"And so the minstrel knight shrinks away. He knows not where to turn.
+All places are alike to him, alike full of darkness and despair. The
+pilgrims are returning home. He follows them, as a dog that had been
+struck and wounded might crawl after men who had been his friends.
+
+"I see the beautiful valley again. The princess is kneeling before a
+little cross. She is praying that the knight whom she loves may be
+forgiven. Back in the rising shadows of the evening stands the knight
+who loves her hopelessly, watching her as she prays. The pilgrims are
+coming from Rome. They are singing songs of mercy and peace. The
+princess looks eagerly among them. The minstrel knight is not there.
+'He will never come back,' she sighs, and she turns away and slowly
+climbs the hill toward her father's castle, where she may pray for him
+again.
+
+"And now a dark figure comes slowly, fearfully on, by the way that the
+pilgrims have passed. He sees his friend, standing where he stood while
+the princess prayed. He calls to him to stand back; he is too guilty
+for any good man to touch or come near him. He tells him how he went to
+Rome and what the Pope said. Then he tells the awful thought that is
+now in his mind. The Goddess of Love and Beauty bade him when all hope
+should be lost to come to her again and stay with her forever. He is
+seeking her mountain now. He calls to her to guide him. Now at the very
+back of the fire I see a rising red glow. The goddess is there and she
+calls to him to hasten to her. 'You are mad,' cries his friend; 'stay;
+be brave; bear it all, and you may yet be forgiven.'
+
+"Suddenly there comes to the knight another thought--the best thought
+he has ever had--the princess. Instantly the red glow is gone and the
+goddess is hidden from him forever. His friend knows his thought. 'She
+is up there,' he says, 'praying for you still.'
+
+"At last the knight is humbled, overcome, subdued. He falls upon his
+face and prays for pardon, as the princess is praying for him up there
+in the castle. And now all at once there is a glad shout, a song of
+happiness and peace. Another band of pilgrims has come from Rome. They
+are bringing the staff of the Pope, and all in a night it has borne
+flowers and leaves. The smell of lilies fills the air. They are
+carrying the staff through the land to tell the knight and all other
+men like him, if, indeed, there are others, that they are forgiven. The
+minstrel knight has found pardon and he may rest."
+
+"And what became of the princess?" the little girl asked.
+
+"The fire is too low," I said; "I cannot see any more. What do you
+think became of her?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered, "but I think she must be very happy that
+the knight is forgiven."
+
+"I think they are both very happy," I said.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING OF THE GRAIL
+
+
+It was the last evening of the year. In honor of the occasion the
+little girl was allowed to sit up rather later than usual--not till
+midnight, of course, so that she could see how different the whole
+world would look after the clock had struck, but long enough to make
+her feel that she was doing something very pleasant, because something
+that it was not good for her to do very often. Our friends down by the
+sea had sent us a strange Christmas present, but they knew what we
+wanted. It was a big box of driftwood, almost a wagon-load. We resolved
+that it should not be used except on great occasions, and of course New
+Year's eve was a great occasion. Here in the city we could not listen
+in the evening stillness and catch the low murmur of the restless
+water, but the fire burned with the same strange and lovely colors as
+if it had been kindled on the beach. Tonight it was not likely that we
+should see any storms or any ghostly ships, yet the little girl knew
+well enough that there were wonderful things to be seen in that fire.
+
+"What can you see in it?" I asked her.
+
+"I don't want to see things myself," she said. "I want you to see them.
+Just think; this is the last time we can have any stories about the
+fire this year."
+
+"But the new year will begin to-morrow," I said, "and it will be just
+as good as the old one, will it not?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I suppose so," she said, "but this has been such a nice year
+that I don't like to have it go. But now tell me what is in the fire."
+
+"There are so many strange things in it that I scarcely know how to
+begin to tell you about them. I am very much afraid that I shall not
+make you understand all that I see in the fire to-night, and I am the
+more afraid of it because I am not at all sure that I can quite
+understand it all myself. But first the reddest and brightest spot in
+the whole fire begins to grow redder and brighter and to take a new
+shape. It is the shape of a goblet. It is of clear crystal and its
+sharp angles and edges sparkle with many colors, but within it that
+strange, deep red glows and shines and grows brighter still, till it
+beats and throbs as if it were alive. And all around it, too, there is
+a circle of soft rays of light, like a halo.
+
+"Perhaps you know what this is, but I am afraid you don't Do you
+remember what I told you once about the Holy Grail? This is the Holy
+Grail--the cup from which the Saviour drank at the Last Supper, and in
+which afterwards His blood was caught as He hung upon the cross. It is
+that blood in the cup which is still alive and glows and beats and
+throbs. This Holy Grail, as I told you before, is guarded by a band of
+knights in a beautiful temple, which nobody can find except those whom
+the Grail itself has chosen and allowed to come. I can see the temple
+now. It has a high, light, graceful dome, which rests on tall pillars
+of marble that is like snow. The whole temple may be of something like
+snow, too, for it melts away so that I cannot see it and comes again,
+then half of it is gone and then the other half, so that I scarcely
+know whether I see it at all. Perhaps it is the smoke of the fire that
+makes it seem so. But I can see that the dome is all covered with
+figures and traceries of gold, which bloom out bright like flowers
+whenever the whole dome looks plainest, and then fade again. But when
+the smoke comes across the whole picture and darkens it for a moment,
+then the lines upon the dome show through it like fire, and they change
+and waver, and then the whole temple is gone again.
+
+"You remember something about the Grail's knights. The Knight of the
+Swan was one of them. They live here in the temple, except when they
+are sent away on some journey, to help some one who is in trouble, to
+do some act of justice, to fight for the right, or to punish the wrong.
+And whether they stay here or go as far away as they can, they never
+need any food except what the Grail gives them. The Grail chooses them
+at first, feeds them afterwards, and gives them their commands, for
+sometimes, in that halo that shines around it, there appear letters and
+words to tell the knights what they should know. And once a year, on
+Good Friday, a white dove flies into the temple and rests upon the Holy
+Grail, to give it more of these powers for the coming year.
+
+"I see now a strange-looking man with a dark face and deep, bright eyes
+which seem never to rest, but always to look and search for something
+that they never find. Yet now and then a cruel light comes into them
+and makes them blaze for an instant, and his hard lips smile a little,
+and then his face grows stern and gloomy again. He is a wicked
+magician. Once he wanted to join the Knights of the Grail. He could
+even be their king, he thought. But the Grail chose its own knights and
+it did not choose him. Then he swore that he would be avenged upon the
+Grail knights; he would tempt them away from the temple, he would
+overthrow them, he would find a way to steal the Grail itself. It was
+for this that he learned his magic. He built an enchanted castle not
+far from the Temple of the Grail and filled it with every kind of
+pleasure that he could devise. Then he tried to entice good knights to
+come to his castle, and if any knight came, if any stayed in the
+enchanted halls to eat or drink or dance or play, that knight was lost
+forever. He could go back to his old friends and his old life no more,
+and his use in the world was ended.
+
+"Again I see a woman--a woman yet more strange than this man. You will
+think so when I tell you who she is. You remember the wife of the King,
+whose daughter danced before the King and pleased him so much that he
+promised her any gift she should ask; how the Queen told her to ask for
+the head of the great prophet, who was in prison, and how the head was
+cut off and brought to her. This woman whom I see was that Queen. The
+old stories say that she saw the Saviour as He passed, bearing His
+cross upon His back, and that she laughed at Him. He only looked at her
+sorrowfully and spoke no word. But always from that time she was forced
+to wander through the world, and laugh at everything that was true and
+good. Can you think of anything more horrible? After a long, weary time
+she wished that she might die, but still through all lands she
+journeyed, laughing at everything she saw that was sweet and pure and
+holy. The wish to die grew and grew till it was her only longing. But
+she could not die. For hundreds of years she has lived unchanged. Some
+say that she can never die or grow old till the best knight of all the
+world shall come and pardon her great sins. Others say that she must
+live till one comes whom she cannot tempt away by her beauty from the
+path he follows.
+
+"For she is very beautiful. It is not the beauty of a common woman that
+she has, but something far beyond it. She can be tender, sweet, gentle,
+enticing, and then in an instant proud, defiant, radiant. Perhaps the
+wicked magician has given her some of this wonderful beauty by his
+magic, for she is in his power and helps him to entrap knights into his
+castle, where they lose all hope of returning to the life of the world
+and of doing good in it. She does not wish to do this, but the magician
+compels her. So always she must tempt and entice at his command the
+knights who come near his castle, and always she must long for one to
+come whom she cannot tempt, for then she will be free. The knights of
+the Grail are not the men for whom she waits. To tempt them is only too
+easy. Even their King cannot resist her.
+
+"I see the King of the Grail now. He holds a spear in his hand that is
+almost as great and wonderful a thing as the Grail itself. From the
+point of the spear flows a little stream of blood. It trickles down the
+shaft of the spear to the King's hand that holds it, but the blood does
+not stain the hand; it flows over it and leaves it clean and white. It
+is the very spear with which the Roman soldier wounded the side of the
+Saviour, and ever since that time the blood has run from its point. But
+the King has wandered too far away from the Temple of the Grail and too
+near the magician's enchanted castle. The magician sees him and sends
+the woman to try to bring him within his power. Such wonderful beauty
+as hers the King has never seen before. For one instant in looking at
+her he forgets to guard the spear; he lets it go from his hand, the
+magician seizes it and strikes the King with it in the side. He is
+borne back to the temple with just such a wound as that other which
+this same spear made so many years ago. And the magician has the spear.
+As he holds it the blood flows from its point and trickles down the
+shaft, and as it flows over his hand it stains it a deep, ugly red. He
+carries the spear to his castle. He has stolen this, and now he will
+wait on and watch for a chance to steal the Grail.
+
+"And the wound in the King's side will not heal. All that can be done
+with medicines and balsams and ointments is done, but they are of no
+use. Many years pass--yes, just while we are looking into the fire--and
+still the wound is the same, still it burns and stings, and still it
+bleeds again whenever the King uncovers the Grail so that it may feed
+the knights who are in the temple and help those who are far away. Some
+wounds, some sicknesses, the Grail itself can cure, but it cannot cure
+this, or it will not. Yet once, while the King knelt before it, he saw
+words that shone like fire in the halo around it, and they said: 'Wait
+for the simple Fool, taught by pity, for him I have chosen.' Perhaps
+you do not see quite what that means. Well, I don't think the King
+quite knows what it means either, but he knows that he has something to
+wait for, and that is better than knowing nothing at all about it. That
+was years ago, and still the wound burns and stings, and still it
+bleeds when the King uncovers the Grail.
+
+"When we look into the fire we can go back through the years just as
+well as forward. So now, going back for a little while and far away
+from the Temple of the Grail, I see something very different from what
+we have seen before. I see a boy who lives with his mother in a forest.
+His father was a knight and was killed in battle. His mother feared
+that when he grew up he would want to be a knight too, and would be
+killed in the same way, so she brought him here to the forest and kept
+him away from the great world where men live and work and fight, and
+never let him know anything about knights or battles or tournaments or
+the courts of kings. She lets him learn to shoot with a bow as he grows
+up, and to hunt the beasts of the woods. He can hit any bird that flies
+with his arrows, and he runs so fast that he can catch the deer by the
+horns.
+
+"Yet he does not know that men wear armor and fight with spears and
+swords, and he has never heard of an army or a battle. Perhaps he may
+be almost enough of a simple fool about these things to help the King
+of the Grail."
+
+"I don't think he was a fool at all," said the little girl, "if his
+mother wouldn't let him hear anything about such things."
+
+"I think," I answered, "that the letters around the Grail could not
+have meant quite what we mean by a fool. The Grail would not choose any
+such person, I am sure. They must have meant some one who was good and
+simple and had not learned the ways of the world. And then you know the
+letters said, 'taught by pity,' so I suppose he is to be a fool at all
+only till he is 'taught by pity.' Well, the mother might have known
+that she could not keep her boy in this ignorance forever, and so one
+day he meets three knights riding through the forest. He is filled with
+wonder and delight at their polished armor, their waving plumes, and
+their long spears, with their glittering points. He asks them who they
+are and what all these wonderful things are for. They tell him that
+they are knights, and everything else that he wants to know, and then
+he runs home to his mother and tells her that he wants to go away and
+see the world and be a knight too.
+
+"She tries to tell him that knights are wicked men, but he will not
+believe it, and he begs her to let him go. She sees that she cannot
+keep him, that all her care has been lost, and at last she says that he
+may go. He has no armor, but perhaps he may get that some time. He
+takes his bow and his arrows and wanders away through the forest, and
+his mother looks after him till she can see no more through her tears.
+
+"We are back near the Temple of the Grail now. I see a beautiful, deep
+forest. An old knight and two young squires are lying on a green bank
+and are just awaking at the sound of trumpets from the temple. They are
+scarcely awake when a strange creature is seen coming toward them. It
+is a woman upon a galloping horse. And the horse is strange enough too.
+Its mane is so long that it drags upon the ground, and then the wind
+catches it and blows it about till the horse looks like a hurrying
+black cloud, and its eyes show through the cloud like flashes of
+lightning. The woman's eyes sometimes are deep and full of fire, and
+sometimes they look dull and cold, almost dead. She is not beautiful.
+She has a dark face, burned as if she had travelled much under hot
+suns. Her long black hair is in disorder and flies all about her in the
+wind. Her dress is in disorder too, and it is fastened around the waist
+by a girdle of snake skin, with long ends that hang down to the ground.
+Everything about her looks wild and terrible. She is a woman whom you
+would not care to meet on a lonely road after dark and on a horse like
+this. Yet if you looked at her face more closely you would not find
+anything cruel in it, but you would find a great deal of sorrow and
+suffering.
+
+"You can never guess who this woman is, so I must tell you. She is the
+very same who helps the wicked magician to entice knights into his
+castle. She looks very different now, to be sure, but it is a strange
+life that she leads altogether. It is only when she is asleep that the
+magician has power over her. When she is awake she tries to atone a
+little for her great sins by serving the Holy Grail. She rides all over
+the world and brings news of battles or messages from knights of the
+Grail who are in distant countries, or she stays here and finds work to
+do at home. But always, because of her curse, she laughs, even at the
+good that she herself tries to do. And at last the longing for rest
+comes upon her again till she cannot resist it. She sinks to sleep, and
+then the magician calls her. She is forced to obey him, he gives her
+back that wonderful beauty, and she helps him in his wicked work.
+
+"Now she has been all the way to Arabia to find a balsam for the King's
+wound. She gives it to the old knight, in a little flask, and then
+throws herself upon the ground to rest. At the same time there comes a
+train of knights, bearing the King of the Grail in a litter toward the
+lake for his morning bath. He thanks the woman for bringing the balsam,
+but she only laughs at what she has done and at his thanks. It will do
+him no good, she says. Alas, he knows too well that it will do him
+none. Nobody can do him good but the simple Fool, taught by pity. And
+so they carry him on to his bath.
+
+"The old knight stays behind. 'Why should we try all these things,' he
+thinks again, 'when none can help him but the simple Fool?' At this
+instant a swan flies up from the lake and then suddenly flutters and
+falls upon the ground. There is an arrow through its heart. Everybody
+who sees it cries out in horror, for it is one of the laws of this
+place that no animal shall be harmed. What man cruel enough to kill
+this beautiful, harmless swan can have found his way here, where none
+can come who is not chosen by the Grail? In a moment some squires run
+in, bringing the murderer of the swan. He is scarcely a man at all,
+hardly more than a boy, and he carries a bow and arrow. It is the same
+boy whom we saw living in the woods with his mother. The old knight
+looks at him sorrowfully. 'Did you kill this poor bird?' he asks.
+
+"'Yes, to be sure,' says the young man,' I can hit anything.'
+
+"The old knight talks with him kindly and tells him how wrong it is to
+kill harmless things. His mother never taught him that. She only tried
+to keep him from knowing anything about knights. The old man makes him
+see how cruel he has been, and at last the boy throws away his arrows
+and breaks his bow. Now the knight asks him who he is, whence he comes,
+and who was his father, but he can answer nothing. Indeed, he knows
+little enough of these things, for his mother never told him. His
+mother and the life that he led with her in the forest are all that he
+can remember to tell the old knight. Even of his mother and of his old
+life the strange woman who lies upon the grass can tell more than he,
+for she has seen him and his mother often, though they did not see her,
+and she laughs at the poor woman who thought she could keep her son
+from ever knowing anything of arms and battles. She tells him, too,
+that his mother is dead; she saw her die as she passed, because he had
+left her. The boy is moved at last, frightened, bewildered. He never
+knew anybody but his mother; she was his only friend; she taught him
+all he ever learned; and she is dead because of him. What shall he do
+now?
+
+"The King and his train come back again from the lake and pass on
+toward the temple. The woman feels the terrible weariness coming upon
+her again. She struggles against it, but it is of no use. She sinks
+upon the ground behind the low bushes and sleeps. The magician can have
+her now if he wants her, and surely he will want her.
+
+"The old knight has been watching the boy. 'Can it be,' he thinks,
+'that this is the Fool, taught by pity, for whom we were to wait?' That
+he is a fool the old man thinks is clear enough, but how could he kill
+the swan? He cannot have been taught very much by pity. But perhaps the
+time for that has not come yet, and surely he could not get here at all
+if the Grail had not chosen him in some way. Perhaps if he sees the
+King, so pale and sick with his wound, and knows how he has suffered
+with it these many years, he may be moved to pity and may learn some
+needful things. So the old knight leads him gently away toward the
+Temple of the Grail.
+
+"They walk through the forest and among the rocks, and as they go there
+comes to them a sound of chimes. It grows clearer as they go on, till
+they reach the temple, and then it is over their heads. They are in a
+grand, beautiful hall that is something like a church, but not quite.
+There are tall pillars and arches, and high above everything is the
+dome, so high that, as one looks up into it, its loftiest curves seem
+dim and misty and the eye loses itself in trying to see how high it is.
+Yet all the light of the great hall streams down from there, and down
+from there too comes the sound of the bells.
+
+"The knights of the Grail are coming into the hall and sitting at two
+tables, long and curved, so that they make a great circle just under
+the dome. On the tables before them are cups, but nothing else. As the
+knights come they sing in chorus, and voices up in the dome and others
+still higher answer their song, while from the height far above them
+all still rings the soft voice of the chimes. And now the King of the
+Grail is borne in upon his couch and is brought to the highest place in
+the hall. Before him something is carried covered with purple cloth. It
+is the Holy Grail itself, and the time has come when it must be
+uncovered, that it may feed and strengthen its knights.
+
+"But the King fears. It is when the Grail is uncovered and when it does
+so much good to all the others, that his wound always bleeds again and
+the pain of it is most terrible. Perhaps you think he is not very brave
+to delay what he knows he must do, but only think of that dreadful
+wound that can never be cured but by the one who is so long in coming;
+yes, think of the slow, weary years that he has waited for the simple
+Fool, and you will not wonder that it is a terrible thing to him to
+uncover the Grail again. But the voices up in the dome still sing the
+promise: 'Wait for the simple Fool, taught by pity, for him I have
+chosen.' The knights gently bid their King do his duty. He makes a sign
+to the boys who have brought the Grail. They uncover it and place it in
+his hand. Everything else in the hall grows dim, while one clear ray of
+light falls from the dome straight upon the Grail, and the red blood
+that is in it shines through the crystal of the goblet as if it were a
+light itself.
+
+"A feeling of peace and gladness comes upon all, even upon the King.
+But now the Grail grows dimmer. The boys cover it again and the old
+light comes slowly back into the hall. All the cups on the tables are
+filled with wine, and beside each one is a piece of bread. It is thus
+that the Holy Grail feeds its knights. But the King does not eat, and
+suddenly he grows paler and presses his hand to his side. His wound is
+bleeding again and his squires quickly carry him away. The knights
+leave the hall too. The old knight is still watching the boy. If he is
+the Fool that was promised, if he is to be taught by pity, surely he
+must pity the poor King and he will ask something about him, why he
+suffers so, or what is his wound. But the old knight waits and the boy
+says nothing. 'Do you know what you have seen?' the knight asks. The
+boy only shakes his head. Then he has not been moved at all; he does
+not pity. 'Begone,' says the knight, 'you are good for nothing,' and he
+sends him away and is alone. And still from the dome, far up and out of
+sight, comes the chiming of the bells. If the old man could hear it
+right, surely it would say to him again: 'Wait for the simple Fool,
+taught by pity, for him I have chosen.'
+
+"The Temple of the Grail is gone now. We are in the castle of the
+wicked magician. He has been thinking too of the young man--the boy--
+the Fool, who was at the Temple of the Grail, and he knows more about
+him than the poor old knight. He knows that if he is ever to steal the
+Holy Grail, as he so long has hoped to do, he must get this Fool into
+his power, of all people in the world. He has a magic mirror in which
+he can see him. He sees that he has left the Temple of the Grail and is
+coming nearer his own castle.
+
+"Now he needs the help of the woman, the woman who is sleeping and
+cannot resist him. He lights a magic fire, right there where you see
+that blue flame in our own fire, he speaks magic words, and the woman
+rises out of the very blue flame itself, and stands before him. But how
+different she is from that woman we saw among the Grail knights! She
+had no beauty then. Now it is radiant, burning, blinding. All that
+might make the beauty of a hundred women--the pride, the tenderness,
+the stateliness, the modesty, the fierceness, the gentleness, the
+rounded form, the glowing color, the waves of hair, the deep eyes, now
+flashing and fiery, and now soft and dewy--are hers. The magician
+smiles as he sees her. With her to help him, what can he not do? He
+tells her whom she is to entice into his power. She will not do it, she
+says. He reminds her that if she cannot entice the Fool she will
+herself be saved from all her wanderings and her weary life. He need
+not remind her of anything. She cannot resist him any more than she
+could resist the sleep that came upon her. What he commands she must
+do.
+
+"Still the magician sees the boy approaching. He calls to the knights
+of the castle to defend it against him. They run out in a crowd to meet
+the Fool. He snatches weapons from the foremost of them and fights them
+all at once. Some he wounds and all he drives before him, for the
+knights that are in the magician's power quickly grow to be cowards.
+Not all of them together can keep him back.
+
+"And now I see the garden of the castle. It is full of big, gay-colored,
+gorgeous flowers. They trail along the ground, they cluster upon the
+terraces, they climb upon the walls of the castle and of the garden, and
+they clutch at the ramparts and twine and twist about them. I suppose I
+must say that they are beautiful flowers, but they are not of the sort
+that I like. Anybody can see that there is magic about them. The earth
+and the water, the air and the sunshine, never would make such flowers.
+It might not be easy to say why, but just a single look at them is
+enough to make one feel sure that they are all poisonous. On the wall of
+the garden, with a sword in his hand, stands the Fool, looking down into
+it and wondering at the flowers. There were none in the least like these
+in the forest where he lived with his mother, and none about the Temple
+of the Grail.
+
+"But what is this more wonderful sight still that he sees? Are the
+flowers alive, and are they running about and playing together? It is a
+crowd of girls, with queer, bright colored gowns that make them look
+for all the world like the huge flowers of the garden. They have just
+run out of the castle and they are all in confusion, and are crying and
+complaining because the knights, who were their play-fellows, have been
+beaten and wounded. Who is he that has done it? Where is he? If they
+could find him they would tear him all to little bits, you would think.
+And then they do find him. There he stands on the wall, looking down at
+them and wondering. And when he says that he will play with them
+instead of the knights, they forget all about everybody but him in a
+moment, and instead of quarrelling with him or trying to punish him for
+wounding their knights, they only quarrel with one another, because
+every one of them wants him all for herself.
+
+"He has come down from the wall and they all gather around him,
+chattering and struggling for him. He does not seem to care half so
+much for them as they do for him, and when he sees that they will do
+nothing but quarrel about him he turns to go away again, but a voice
+calls him and tells him to stay. He turns again and stops, and all the
+living flowers run away, chattering and laughing at him. The voice that
+called him was the woman's, He is bewildered when he sees her. He has
+never seen such beauty before, any more than you or I ever have. For an
+instant he thinks that she is another of the strange flowers of this
+strange garden. Yet her beauty does not seem to move him very much.
+Perhaps that is because he is a Fool.
+
+"But she speaks to him not at all as the other living flowers did. At
+first she makes him remember the old years when he was with his mother,
+how she cared for him in everything, and how she tried to keep him from
+knowing those things which she dreaded that he should learn. Then she
+tells him again how she died when he had left her. This, she thinks,
+with what she is to say next, may move him, and indeed it does, but not
+as she meant that it should. The great sorrow for his mother comes upon
+him again, and stronger than when he heard first that she was dead. He
+weeps now and throws himself upon the ground, and nothing can comfort
+him.
+
+"The woman tries to console him now. She tells him that if he will but
+stay he may have all the pleasures of the magician's castle, and she
+will love him, she, the most beautiful woman in the whole world. But he
+does not heed her, the Fool--he is thinking of other things. He
+remembers the King and his wound. So much he remembers that he almost
+feels the wound in himself. And as the woman bends above him there
+comes another thought. Nobody has ever told him, yet somehow now he
+knows, that it was she who tempted the King when he got that wound,
+just as she tries to tempt him now. I think that it is his own great
+sorrow that has made him know something of what another's sorrow must
+be, and when he has remembered the King and has felt the wound himself,
+all this has helped him to see and to know much more. Perhaps this is
+the way that he is 'taught by pity.'
+
+"The woman cannot move him more, cannot tempt him, but now the magician
+himself stands on the wall of the castle with the spear in his hand.
+The blood still flows from the point and trickles down the shaft to his
+hand and stains it that deep, ugly red. He poises the spear a moment
+and then hurls it at the Fool. But it will not strike him. It stops
+above his head and hangs in the air. The Fool lifts his hand and grasps
+the spear. The blood from its point runs down the shaft and over his
+hand, and leaves it clean and white. He only shakes the spear in his
+hand, and the castle and the garden tremble and fall, as the fire here
+falls together, and they are gone.
+
+"Once more we are near the Temple of the Grail. The place is at the
+edge of woods which reach away in one direction, while in the other are
+fields and meadows. It is spring, and the green of the trees is fresh
+and light, and the fields are covered with flowers. They are not like
+the flowers of that magic garden. Their bright little cups hold cool
+drops of dew, and the air is full of their perfume. The old knight is
+here. He has heard a sound like a groan from the little thicket of low
+bushes and brambles at the border of the wood. He searches, and brings
+out a woman--the same woman. She is still asleep, but in a moment she
+slowly awakes. She is no longer beautiful. She is out of the magician's
+power now, even if he is not buried under his ruined castle. She is
+ready to serve the Grail.
+
+"The Grail! Alas! nobody serves the Grail now. The poor King, since
+that last time when the Fool saw him uncover the Grail, will touch it
+no more. He fears too much the pain of his wound. It cannot feed or
+help its knights now, and they cannot go any more to carry help into
+far-off lands. But to-day the King has promised that he will uncover it
+for one last time, for this is Good Friday, when the dove comes to
+renew the power of the Grail.
+
+"While the old knight and the woman stand here, another comes toward
+them. He is a knight in black armor, with his helmet closed, and
+carrying a spear. 'Do you not know,' the old knight asks him, 'what
+holy day this is, and that none now should come here bearing arms?' The
+black knight only shakes his head. He sets his spear in the ground and
+kneels before it, taking off his helmet and gazing up at the point,
+from which the blood flows. The old knight looks at him and at the
+spear in wonder. Then he sees the blood, and by that he knows what
+spear it is. He looks again at the knight, with his helmet off, and now
+he knows him too. He is filled with a joy that he has not known these
+many years. Yes, the sorrows of the King and of the knights of the
+Grail are over now. This is indeed 'the simple Fool, taught by pity,'
+this is he whom the Grail has chosen.
+
+"And now there comes the soft sound of the chimes to tell them that it
+is time for them to go to the temple to see the Grail uncovered. The
+old knight leads the way and the others follow. Through the woods and
+along the rocky pathways they walk, the sound of the bells grows
+plainer, and so they come to the temple. The hall is filled with the
+knights of the Grail. The King is borne in as he was before, and is
+brought to the highest place. The Holy Grail is carried before him with
+its purple cover. They all look at the King and wait for him. For a
+moment he wavers, then he springs from his couch--no, no, he will not
+uncover the Grail again; let him die rather; let them kill him, and
+then the Grail shall feed them and bless them, and shall torture him no
+more.
+
+[Illustration: "THE KING OF THE GRAIL."]
+
+"They all draw back from him in dread at his look and his words--all
+but one. For the Fool goes straight to him and touches the wound with
+the spear. Instantly the wound is healed. 'You shall uncover the Grail
+no more,' he says, 'for I am chosen to be its King instead of you.' He
+makes a sign to the boys who have brought it, and they uncover it and
+place it in his hand. He holds it above his head and again the red
+blood in it glows and throbs. Down from the dome flies a white dove and
+rests above it. Before it, and before him who holds it, kneel the old
+King, no longer king now, the old knight, and the woman, for her too
+this new King has saved, for he has come, the best knight of the world
+and one whom she could not tempt. The simple Fool is the King of the
+Grail. The sound of the singing voices comes down from the dome, and
+from far above them come still the voices of the bells. Surely to any
+who could know how to hear it their chiming must say again: 'Taught by
+pity--him I have chosen,'"
+
+
+
+
+THE ASHES
+
+
+After the little girl had gone, I still sat for a long time looking
+into the fire. I was seeing pictures for myself, not now of the days so
+long gone by, but of days not yet come, pictures with the little girl
+in them. There, in the flames where we had seen so much together, I
+could see pretty clearly, as I thought, what she would be and all that
+she would be some time. But when I tried to see what she would do and
+how her lot should fall, the fire would tell me no more. Yet wherever
+and however it shall fall, may she not be a little better, a little
+wiser, a little happier perhaps, for knowing these old stories that
+have helped so many women and so many men before her to live their
+lives? Will it not be good for her to remember Brünnhilde's fearless
+truth, Senta's sacrifice, Elizabeth's constancy? And if to the thoughts
+of these she add Parsifal's lesson of compassion, surely then even a
+little of Eva's coquetry can do no harm.
+
+And then I tried to see something of her knight. But the fire had all
+died down now, and was only a heap of ashes. I could question as much
+as I would, but there was no reply. Would he seek her out and come to
+her like Siegfried, through struggles and through fire? Would he find
+and help her in her greatest need, like Lohengrin? Would he only love
+her and sing a song for her, like Walter? Or would it be for her to
+help and to save him, like Vanderdecken?--Surely not like Tannhäuser.
+No, no answer. I stirred the ashes. Underneath there was still a
+bright, ruddy, friendly glow, but nothing more.
+
+A clock somewhere in the house, with a low, musical note, struck
+midnight. But what was this other music that followed it? Was it again
+the bells of Monsalvat, this soft chime that came on the still air? No,
+no, only church bells far off, ringing in the New Year, Many times I
+had heard them and well I knew their sound. And all around those bells,
+I knew too, at this moment, there were noise and uproar and confusion,
+so much that those who stood nearest to them in the street could not
+tell whether they were ringing, just as many other sweet and pleasant
+things are made to seem lost among the coarse and the commonplace. But
+to me here, away from the vulgar crowd and forgetting it, the music
+came, faint indeed, yet clear and pure. I opened the window and the
+chime came plainer with the keen winter air, and the bells--I am sure
+of it--answered all my questions and rang a promise for the New Year
+and for all the years.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wagner Story Book, by Henry Frost
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAGNER STORY BOOK ***
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