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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75624 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF JOY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+                                THE HOUSE
+                                  OF JOY
+
+                               BY LAURENCE
+                                 HOUSMAN
+
+                                   1895
+
+                            LONDON: KEGAN PAUL
+                           TRENCH TRÜBNER & CO.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  THE PRINCE WITH THE NINE SORROWS   _Page_ 1
+
+  THE LUCK OF THE ROSES                    23
+
+  THE WHITE KING                           35
+
+  THE STORY OF THE HERONS                  51
+
+  SYRINGA                                  85
+
+  THE TRAVELLER’S SHOES                   101
+
+  THE MOON-FLOWER                         135
+
+  HAPPY RETURNS                           169
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCE WITH THE NINE SORROWS
+
+  _TO_
+  CLARE AND IDA
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE PRINCE WITH THE NINE SORROWS
+
+    _Eight-white peahens went down to the gate:_
+    _“Wait!” they said, “little sister, wait!”_
+    _They covered her up with feathers so fine;_
+    _And none went out, when there went back nine._
+
+A long time ago there lived a King and a Queen, who had an only son. As
+soon as he was born his mother gave him to the forester’s wife to be
+nursed; for she herself had to wear her crown all day and had no time for
+nursing. The forester’s wife had just given birth to a little daughter
+of her own; but she loved both children equally and nursed them together
+like twins.
+
+One night the Queen had a dream that made the half of her hair turn
+grey. She dreamed that she saw the Prince her son at the age of twenty
+lying dead with a wound over the place of his heart; and near him his
+foster-sister was standing, with a royal crown on her head, and his heart
+bleeding between her hands.
+
+The next morning the Queen sent in great haste for the family Fairy, and
+told her of the dream. The Fairy said, “This can have but one meaning,
+and it is an evil one. There is some danger that threatens your son’s
+life in his twentieth year, and his foster-sister is to be the cause of
+it; also, it seems she is to make herself Queen. But leave her to me, and
+I will avert the evil chance; for the dream coming beforehand shows that
+the Fates mean that he should be saved.”
+
+The Queen said, “Do anything; only do not destroy the forester’s wife’s
+child, for as yet at least, she has done no wrong. Let her only be
+carried away to a safe place and made secure and treated well. I will not
+have my son’s happiness grow out of another one’s grave.”
+
+The Fairy said, “Nothing is so safe as a grave when the Fates are awake.
+Still, I think I can make everything quite safe within reason, and leave
+you a clean as well as a quiet conscience.”
+
+The little Prince and the forester’s daughter grew up together till they
+were a year old; then, one day, when their nurse came to look for them,
+the Prince was found, but his foster-sister was lost; and though the
+search for her was long, she was never seen again, nor could any trace of
+her be found.
+
+The baby Prince pined and pined, and was so sorrowful over her loss that
+they feared for a time that he was going to die. But his foster-mother,
+in spite of her grief over her own child’s disappearance, nursed him so
+well and loved him so much that after a while he recovered his strength.
+
+Then the forester’s wife gave birth to another daughter, as if to console
+herself for the loss of the first. But the same night that the child was
+born the Queen had just the same dream over again. She dreamed that she
+saw her son lying dead at the age of twenty; and there was the wound in
+his breast, and the forester’s daughter was standing by with his heart in
+her hand and a royal crown upon her head.
+
+The poor Queen’s hair had gone quite white when she sent again for the
+family Fairy, and told her how the dream had repeated itself. The Fairy
+gave her the same advice as before, quieting her fears, and assuring her
+that however persistent the Fates might be in threatening the Prince’s
+life, all in the end should be well.
+
+Before another year was passed the second of the forester’s daughters had
+disappeared; and the Prince and his foster-mother cried themselves ill
+over a loss that had been so cruelly renewed. The Queen, seeing how great
+were the sorrow and the love that the Prince bore for his foster-sisters,
+began to doubt in her heart and say, “What have I done? Have I saved my
+son’s life by taking away his heart?”
+
+Now every year the same thing took place, the forester’s wife giving
+birth to a daughter, and the Queen on the same night having the same
+fearful dream of the fate that threatened her son in his twentieth
+year; and afterwards the family Fairy would come, and then one day the
+forester’s wife’s child would disappear, and be heard of no more.
+
+At last when nine daughters in all had been born to the forester’s wife
+and lost to her when they were but a year old, the Queen fell very ill.
+Every day she grew weaker and weaker, and the little Prince came and
+sat by her, holding her hand and looking at her with a sorrowful face.
+At last one night (it was just a year after the last of the forester’s
+children had disappeared) she woke suddenly, stretching out her arms and
+crying. “Oh, Fairy,” she cried, “the dream, the dream!” And covering her
+face with her hands, she died.
+
+The little Prince was now more than ten years old, and the very saddest
+of mortals. He said that there were nine sorrows hidden in his heart, of
+which it could not get rid; and that at night, when all the birds went
+home to roost, he heard cries of lamentation and pain; but whether these
+came from very far away, or out of his own heart he could not tell.
+
+Yet he grew slenderly and well, and had such grace and tenderness in his
+nature that all who saw him loved him. His foster-mother, when he spoke
+to her of his nine sorrows, tried to comfort him, calling him her own
+nine joys; and, indeed, he was all the joy left in life for her.
+
+When the Prince neared his twentieth year, the King his father felt that
+he himself was becoming old and weary of life. “I shall not live much
+longer,” he thought: “very soon my son will be left alone in the world.
+It is right, therefore, now that he should know what is the danger that
+threatens his life.” For till then the Prince had not known anything;
+all had been kept a secret between the Queen and the King and the family
+Fairy.
+
+The old King knew of the Prince’s nine sorrows, and often he tried to
+believe that they came by chance, and had nothing to do with the secret
+that sat at the root of his son’s life. But now he feared more and more
+to tell the Prince the story of those nine dreams, lest the knowledge
+should indeed serve but as the crowning point of his sorrows, and
+altogether break his heart for him.
+
+Yet there was so much danger in leaving the thing untold that at last he
+summoned the Prince to his bedside, meaning to tell him all. The King had
+worn himself so ill with anxiety and grief in thinking over the matter,
+that now to tell all was the only means of saving his life.
+
+The Prince came and knelt down, and leaned his head on his father’s
+pillow; and the King whispered into his ear the story of the dreams, and
+of how for his sake all the Prince’s foster-sisters had been spirited
+away.
+
+Before his tale was done he could no longer bear to look into his son’s
+face, but closed his eyes, and, with long silences between, spoke as one
+who prayed.
+
+When he had ended he lay quite still, and the Prince kissed his closed
+eyelids and went softly out of the room.
+
+“Now I know,” he said to himself; “now at last!” And he came through the
+wood and knocked at his foster-mother’s door. “Other mother,” he said to
+her, “give me a kiss for each of my sisters, for now I am going out into
+the world to find them, to be rid of the sorrows in my heart.”
+
+“They can never be found!” she cried, but she kissed him nine times.
+“And this,” she said, “was Monica, and this was Ponica, and this was
+Veronica,” and so she went over every name. “But now they are only
+names!” she wept, as she let him go.
+
+He went along, and he went along, and he went along. “Where may you be
+going to, fair sir?” asked an old peasant at whose cabin the Prince
+sought shelter when night came to the first day of his wanderings.
+“Truly,” answered the Prince, “I do not know how far or whither I need to
+go; but I have a finger-post in my heart that keeps pointing me.”
+
+So that night he stayed there, and the next day he went on.
+
+“Where to so fast?” asked a wood-cutter when the second night found him
+in the thickest and loneliest parts of the forest. “Here the night is so
+dark and the way so dangerous, one like you should not go alone.”
+
+“Nay, I know nothing,” said the Prince, “only I feel like a weather-cock
+in a wind that keeps turning me to its will!”
+
+After many days he came to a small long valley rich in woods and
+water-courses, but no road ran through it. More and more it seemed like
+the world’s end, a place unknown, or forgotten of its old inhabitants.
+Just at the end of the valley, where the woods opened into clear slopes
+and hollows toward the west, he saw before him, low and overgrown, the
+walls of a little tumble-down grange. “There,” he said to himself when
+he saw it, “I can find shelter for to-night. Never have I felt so tired
+before, or such a pain at my heart!”
+
+Before long he came to a little gate and a winding path that led in
+among lawns and trees to the door of an old house. The house seemed as
+if it had been once lived in, but there was no sign of any life about it
+now. He pushed open the door, and suddenly there was a sharp rustling of
+feathers, and nine white peahens rose up from the ground and flew out of
+the window into the garden.
+
+The Prince searched the whole house over, and found it a mere ruin; the
+only signs of life to be seen were the white feathers that lifted and
+blew about over the floors.
+
+Outside, the garden was gathering itself together in the dusk, and the
+peahens were stepping daintily about the lawns, picking here and there
+between the blades of grass. They seemed to suit the gentle sadness of
+the place, which had an air of grief that has grown at ease with itself.
+
+The Prince went out into the garden, and walked about among the quietly
+stepping birds; but they took no heed of him. They came picking up their
+food between his very feet, as though he were not there. Silence held all
+the air, and in the cleft of the valley the day drooped to its end.
+
+Just before it grew dark, the nine white peahens gathered together at the
+foot of a great elm, and lifting up their throats they wailed in chorus.
+Their lamentable cry touched the Prince’s heart; “where,” he asked
+himself, “have I heard such sorrow before?” Then all with one accord the
+birds sprang rustling up to the lowest boughs of the elm, and settled
+themselves to roost.
+
+The Prince went back to the house, to find some corner amid its
+half-ruined rooms to sleep in. But there the air was close, and an
+unpleasant smell of moisture came from the floor and walls: so, the night
+being warm, he returned to the garden, and folding himself in his cloak
+lay down under the tree where the nine peahens were at roost.
+
+For a long time he tried to sleep, but could not, there was so much pain
+and sorrow in his heart.
+
+Presently when it was close upon midnight, over his head one of the
+birds stirred and ruffled through all its feathers; and he heard a soft
+voice say:
+
+“Sisters, are you awake?”
+
+All the other peahens lifted their heads, and turned toward the one that
+spoke, saying, “Yes, sister, we are awake.”
+
+Then the first one said again, “Our brother is here.”
+
+They all said, “He is our enemy; it is for him that we endure this
+sorrow.”
+
+“To-night,” said the first, “we may all be free.”
+
+They answered, “Yes, we may all be free! Who will go down and peck out
+his heart? Then we shall be free.”
+
+And the first who had spoken said, “I will go down!”
+
+“Do not fail, sister!” said all the others. “For if you fail you can
+speak to us no more.”
+
+The first peahen answered, “Do not fear that I shall fail!” And she began
+stepping down the long boughs of the elm.
+
+The Prince lying below heard all that was said. “Ah! poor sisters,” he
+thought, “have I found you at last; and are all these sorrows brought
+upon you for me?” And he unloosed his doublet, and opened his vest,
+making his breast bare for the peahen to come and peck out his heart.
+
+He lay quite still with his eyes shut, and when she reached the ground
+the peahen found him lying there, as it seemed to her fast asleep, with
+his white breast bare for the stroke of her beak.
+
+Then so fair he looked to her, and so gentle in his youth, that she had
+pity on him, and stood weeping by his side, and laying her head against
+his, whispered, “O, brother, once we lay as babes together and were
+nursed at the same breast! How can I peck out your heart?”
+
+Then she stole softly back into the tree, and crouched down again by her
+companions. They said to her, “Our minute of midnight is nearly gone. Is
+there blood on your beak! Have you our brother’s heart for us?” But the
+other answered never a word.
+
+In the morning the peahens came rustling down out of the elm, and went
+searching for fat carnation buds and anemone seeds among the flower-beds
+in the garden. To the Prince they showed no sign either of hatred or
+fear, but went to and fro carelessly, pecking at the ground about his
+feet. Only one came with drooping head and wings, and sleeked itself to
+his caress, and the Prince, stooping down, whispered in her ear, “O,
+sister, why did you not peck out my heart.”
+
+At night, as before, the peahens all cried in chorus as they went up into
+the elm; and the Prince came and wrapped himself in his cloak, and lay
+down at the foot of it to watch.
+
+At midnight the eight peahens lifted their heads, and said, “Sister, why
+did you fail last night?” But their sister gave them not a word.
+
+“Alas!” they said, “now she has failed, unless one of us succeed we shall
+never hear her speak with her human voice again. Why is it that you weep
+so,” they said again, “now when deliverance is so near?” For the poor
+peahen was shaken with weeping, and her tears fell down in loud drops
+upon the ground.
+
+Then the next sister said, “I will go down! He is asleep. Be certain,
+I will not fail!” So she climbed softly down the tree, and the Prince
+opened his shirt and laid his breast bare for her to come and take out
+his heart.
+
+Presently she stood by his side, and when she saw him, she too had pity
+on him for the youth and kindness of his face. And once she shut her
+eyes, and lifted her head for the stroke; but then weakness seized her,
+and she laid her head softly upon his heart and said, “Once the breast
+that gave me milk gave milk also to you. You were my sister’s brother,
+and she spared you: so how can I peck out your heart?” And having said
+this she went softly back into the tree, and crouched down again among
+her sisters.
+
+They said to her, “Have you blood upon your beak? Is his heart ours?” But
+she answered them no word.
+
+The next day the two sisters, who because their hearts betrayed them had
+become mute, followed the Prince wherever he went, and stretched up their
+heads to his caress. But the others went and came indifferently, careless
+except for food; for until midnight their human hearts were asleep; only
+now the two sisters who had given their voices away had regained their
+human hearts perpetually.
+
+That night the same thing happened as before. “Sisters,” said the
+youngest, “to-night I will go down, since the two eldest of us have
+failed. My wrong is fresher in my heart than theirs! Be sure I shall not
+fail!” So the youngest peahen came down from the tree, and the Prince
+laid his heart bare for her beak, but the bird could not find the will
+to peck it out. And so it was the next night, and the next, until eight
+nights were gone.
+
+So at last only one peahen was left. At midnight she raised her head,
+saying, “Sisters, are you awake?”
+
+They all turned, and gazed at her weeping, but could say no word.
+
+Then she said, “You have all failed, having all tried but me. Now if I
+fail we shall remain mute and captive for ever, more undone by the loss
+of our last remaining gift of speech than we were at first. But I tell
+you, dear sisters, I will not fail; for the happiness of you all lies
+with me now!”
+
+Then she went softly down the tree; and one by one they all went
+following her, and weeping, to see what the end would be.
+
+They stood some way apart, watching with upturned heads, and their poor
+throats began catching back a wish to cry as the little peahen, the last
+of the sisters, came and stood by the Prince.
+
+Then she, too, looked in his face, and saw the white breast made bare
+for her beak; and the love of him went deep down into her heart. And she
+tried and tried to shut her eyes and deal the stroke, but could not.
+
+She trembled and sighed, and turned to look at her sisters, where they
+all stood weeping silently together. “They have spared him,” she said to
+herself: “why should not I?”
+
+But the Prince, seeing that she, too, was about to fail like the rest of
+them, turned and said, as if in his sleep, “Come, come, little peahen,
+and peck out my heart!”
+
+At that she turned back again to him, and laid her head down upon his
+heart and cried more sadly than them all.
+
+Then he said, “You have eight sisters, and a mother who cries for her
+children to return!” Yet still she thought he was dreaming, and speaking
+only in his sleep. The other peahens came no nearer, but stood weeping
+silently. She looked from him to them. “O,” she cried, “I have a wicked
+heart, to let one stand in the way of nine!” Then she threw up her neck
+and cried lamentably with her peafowl’s voice, wishing that the Prince
+would wake up and see her, and so escape. And at that all the other
+peahens lifted up their heads and wailed with her: but the Prince never
+turned, nor lifted a finger, nor uttered a sound.
+
+Then she drew in a deep breath, and closed her eyes fast. “Let my sisters
+go, but let me be as I am!” she cried; and with that she stooped down,
+and pecked out his heart.
+
+All her sisters shrieked as their human shapes returned to them. “O,
+sister! O, wicked little sister!” they cried, “What have you done!”
+
+The little white peahen crouched close down to the side of the dead
+Prince. “I loved him more than you all!” she tried to say: but she only
+lifted her head, and wailed again and again the peafowl’s cry.
+
+The Prince’s heart lay beating at her feet, so glad to be rid of its nine
+sorrows that mere joy made it live on, though all the rest of the body
+lay cold.
+
+The peahen leaned down upon the Prince’s breast, and there wailed without
+ceasing: till suddenly, piercing with her beak her own breast, she drew
+out her own living heart and laid it in the place where his had been.
+
+And, as she did so, the wound where she had pierced him closed and became
+healed; and her heart was, as it were, buried in the Prince’s breast. In
+her death agony she could feel it there, her own heart leaping within his
+breast for joy.
+
+The Prince, who had seemed to be dead, flushed from head to foot as the
+warmth of life came back to him; with one deep breath he woke, and found
+the little white peahen lying as if dead between his arms.
+
+Then he laughed softly and rose (his goodness making him wise), and
+taking up his own still beating heart he laid it into the place of hers.
+At the first beat of it within her breast, the peahen became transformed
+as all her sisters had been, and her own maiden form came back to her.
+And the pain and the wound in her breast grew healed together, so that
+she stood up alive and well in the Prince’s arms.
+
+“Dear heart!” said he: and “Dear, dear heart!” said she; but whether
+they were speaking of their own hearts or of each other’s, who can tell?
+for which was which they themselves did not know.
+
+Then all round was so much embracing and happiness that it is out of
+reach for tongue or pen to describe. For truly the Prince and his
+foster-sisters loved each other dearly, and could put no bounds upon
+their present contentment. As for the Prince and the one who had plucked
+out his heart, of no two was the saying ever more truly told, that they
+had lost their hearts to each other; nor was ever love in the world known
+before that carried with it such harmony as theirs.
+
+And so it all came about according to the Queen’s dream that the
+forester’s daughter wore the royal crown upon her head, and held the
+Prince’s heart in her hand.
+
+Long before he died the old King was made happy because the dream
+that he had feared so much had become true: and the forester’s wife
+was happy before she died: and as for the Prince and his wife and his
+foster-sisters, they were all rather happy: and none of them is dead
+yet.
+
+
+
+
+THE LUCK OF THE ROSES
+
+  _TO_
+  CLEMENCE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE LUCK OF THE ROSES
+
+Not far from a great town, in the midst of a well-wooded valley, lived a
+rose-gardener and his wife. All round the old home green sleepy hollows
+lay girdled by silver streams, long grasses bent softly in the wind, and
+the half fabulous murmur of woods filled the air.
+
+Up in their rose-garden, on the valley’s side facing the sun, the
+gardener and his wife lived contentedly sharing toil and ease. They had
+been young, they were not yet old; and though they had to be frugal they
+did not call themselves poor. A strange fortune had belonged always to
+the plot of ground over which they laboured; whether because the soil was
+so rich, or the place so sheltered from cold, or the gardener so skilled
+in the craft, which had come down in his family from father to son,
+could not be known; but certainly it was true that his rose-trees gave
+forth better bloom and bore earlier and later through the season than any
+others that were to be found in those parts.
+
+The good couple accepted what came to them, simply and gladly, thanking
+God. Perhaps it was from the kindness of fortune, or perhaps because the
+sweet perfume of the roses had mixed itself in their blood, that her man
+and his wife were so sweet-tempered and gentle in their ways. The colour
+of the roses was in their faces, and the colour of the rose was in their
+hearts; to her man she was the most beautiful and dearest of sweethearts,
+to his wife he was the best and kindest of lovers.
+
+Every morning, before it was light, her man and his wife would go into
+the garden and gather all the roses that were ripe for sale; then with
+full baskets on their backs they would set out, and get to the market
+just as the level sunbeams from the east were striking all the vanes and
+spires of the city into gold. There they would dispose of their flowers
+to the florists and salesmen of the town, and after that trudge home
+again to hoe, and dig, and weed, and water, and prune, and plant for the
+rest of the day. No man ever saw them the one without the other, and the
+thought that such a thing might some day happen was the only fear and
+sorrow of their lives.
+
+That they had no children of their own was scarcely a sorrow to them. “It
+seems to me,” said her man after they had been married for some years,
+“that God means that our roses are to be our children since He has made
+us love them so much. They will last when we are grown grey, and will
+support and comfort us in our old age.”
+
+All the roses they had were red, and varied little in kind, yet her man
+and his wife had a name for each of them; to every tree they had given
+a name, until it almost seemed that the trees knew, and tried to answer
+when they heard the voices which spoke to them.
+
+“Jane Janet, and you ought to blossom more freely at your age!” his wife
+might say to one some evening as she went round and watered the flowers;
+and the next day, when the two came to their dark morning’s gathering,
+Jane Janet would show ten or twelve great blooms under the light of the
+lantern, every one of them the birth of a single night.
+
+“Mary Maudlin,” the gardener would say, as he washed the blight off a
+favourite rose, “to be sure, you are very beautiful, but did I not love
+you so, you were more trouble than all your sisters put together.” And
+then all at once great dew-drops would come tumbling down out of Mary
+Maudlin’s eyes at the tender words of his reproach. So day by day the
+companionable feet of the happy couple moved to and fro, always intent on
+the tender nurturing of their children.
+
+In their garden they had bees too, who drew all their honey from the
+roses, and lived in a cone-thatched hive close under the porch; and that
+honey was famous through all the country-side, for its flavour was like
+no other honey made in the world.
+
+Sometimes his wife said to her man, “I think our garden is looked after
+for us by some good Spirit; perhaps it is the Saints after whom we have
+named our rose-children.”
+
+Her man made answer, “It is rich in years, which, like an old wine, have
+made it gain in flavour; it has been with us from father to son for
+three hundred years, and that is a great while.”
+
+“A full fairy’s lifetime!” said his wife. “’Tis a pity we shall not hand
+it on, being childless.”
+
+“When we two die,” said her man, “the roses will make us a grave and
+watch over us.” As he spoke a whole shower of petals fell from the trees.
+
+“Did no one pass, just then?” said his wife.
+
+Now one morning, soon after this, in the late season of roses, her man
+had gone before his wife into the garden, gathering for the market in
+the grey dusk before dawn; and wherever he went moths and beetles came
+flocking to the light of his lantern, beating against its horn shutters
+and crying to get in. Out of each rose, as the light fell on it, winged
+things sprang up into the darkness; but all the roses were bowed and
+heavy as if with grief. As he picked them from the stem great showers of
+dew fell out of them, making pools in the hollow of his palm.
+
+There was such a sound of tears that he stopped to listen, and, surely,
+from all round the garden came the “drip, drip” of falling dew. Yet
+the pathways under foot were all dry: there had been no rain and but
+little dew. Whence was it, then, that the roses so shook and sobbed? For
+under the stems, surely, there was something that sobbed; and suddenly
+the light of the lantern took hold of a beautiful small figure, about
+three feet high, dressed in old rose and green, that went languidly from
+flower to flower. She lifted up such tired hands to draw their heads
+down to hers; and to each one she kissed she made a weary little sound
+of farewell, her beautiful face broken up with grief; and now and then
+out of her lips ran soft chuckling laughter, as if she still meant to be
+glad, but could not.
+
+The gardener broke into tears to behold a sight so pitiful; and his wife
+had stolen out silently to his side, and was weeping too.
+
+“Drip, drip” went the roses: wherever she came and kissed, they all began
+weeping. The gardener and his wife knelt down and watched her; in and
+out, in and out, not a rose-blossom did she miss. She came nearer and
+nearer, and at last was standing before them. She seemed hardly able to
+draw limb after limb, so weak was she; and her filmy garments hung heavy
+as chains.
+
+A little voice said in their ears, “Kiss me, I am dying!”
+
+They tasted her breath of rose.
+
+“Do not die!” they said simply.
+
+“I have lived three hundred years,” she answered. “Now I must die. I am
+the Luck of the Roses, but I must leave them and die.”
+
+“When must you die?” said her man and his wife.
+
+The little lady said: “Before the last roses are over; the chills of
+night take me, the first frost will kill me. Soon I must die. Now I must
+dwindle and dwindle, for little life is left to me, and only so can I
+keep warm. As life and heat grow less, so must I, till presently I am no
+more.”
+
+She was a little thing already—not old, she did not seem old, but
+delicate as a snowflake, and so weary. She laid her head in the hand of
+the gardener’s wife and sobbed hard.
+
+“You dear people, who belong so much to me too, I have watched over you.”
+
+“Let us watch over you!” said they. They lifted her like a
+feather-weight, and carried her into the house. There, in the
+ingle-nook, she sat and shivered, while they brought rose-leaves and
+piled round her; but every hour she grew less and less.
+
+Presently the sun shone full upon her from the doorway: its light went
+through her as through coloured glass; and her man and his wife saw, over
+the ingle behind her, shadows fluttering as of falling rose-petals: it
+was the dying rose of her life, falling without end.
+
+All day long she dwindled and grew more weak and frail. Before sunset she
+was smaller than a small child when it first comes into the world. They
+set honey before her to taste, but she was too weary to uncurl her tiny
+hands: they lay like two white petals in the green lap of her dress. The
+half-filled panniers of roses stood where they had been set down in the
+porch: the good couple had taken nothing to the market that day. The luck
+of the house lay dying, for all their care; they could but sit and watch.
+
+When the sun had set, she faded away fast: now she was as small as a
+young wren. The gardener’s wife took her and held her for warmth in the
+hollow of her hand. Presently she seemed no more than a grasshopper:
+the tiny chirrup of her voice was heard, about the middle of the night,
+asking them to take her and lay her among the roses, in the heart of one
+of the red roses, that there at last she might die and pass into nothing.
+
+They went together into the dark night, and felt their way among the
+roses; presently they quite lost her tiny form: she had slipped away into
+the heart of a Jane Janet rose.
+
+The gardener and his wife went back into the house and sat waiting; they
+did not know for what, but they were too sad at heart to think just then
+of sleep.
+
+Soon the first greys of morning began to steal over the world; pale
+shivers ran across the sky, and one bird chirped in its sleep among the
+trees.
+
+All at once there rang a soft sound of lamentation among the roses in the
+rose-garden; again and again, like the cry of many gentle wounded things
+in pain. The gardener and his wife went and opened the door: they had to
+tell the bees of the fairy’s death. They looked out under the twilight,
+into the garden they loved. “Drip,” “drip,” “drip” came the sound of
+steady weeping under the leaves. Peering out through the shadows they saw
+all the rose-trees rocking themselves softly for grief.
+
+“Snow?” said his wife to her man.
+
+But it was not snow.
+
+Under the dawn all the roses in the garden had turned white; for they
+knew that the fairy was dead.
+
+The gardener and his wife woke the bees, and told them of the fairy’s
+death; then they looked in each other’s faces, and saw that they, too,
+had become white and grey.
+
+With gentle eyes the old couple took hands, and went down into the garden
+to gather white roses for the market.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE KING
+
+  _TO_
+  KATE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE WHITE KING
+
+Long years ago there was living a Queen who could not keep count of the
+countries over which she ruled. Her wealth and her wonderful beauty
+made her an apple of discord to all the kings who lived round about her
+borders. For love of her they waged perpetual war upon one another, and
+every king who proved victorious made a gift to the Queen of the country
+of the one whom he had conquered, in the hopes of thereby strengthening
+his claim to her favour. Thus it came about that she could no longer keep
+count of the lands which had fallen under her rule; yet still of all her
+suitors she chose none.
+
+Now at this time there was one King, and only one, who had not succeeded
+in losing his heart to the Queen’s majesty, in spite of her wealth and
+power, and all her wonderful beauty. And so, during a long time, since
+his fancy was thus free, he was left in undisturbed peace and prosperity,
+while other kings fought out their jealous battles, and stole away each
+other’s lands. And because his reign was so quiet and his country in such
+rest, his people, for a pet-name and for their pride in him, named him
+“the White King.”
+
+Now after a time the Queen took it as an insult that any one should be
+so indifferent to the power of her charms, and she began to threaten him
+with war for this reason and for that, wishing thereby to cajole him into
+becoming her suitor. But the White King saw through all the disguises
+with which she covered her meaning, and understood the arrogance of her
+claim; so one day he sent to her as a gift a statue of himself with his
+sword sheathed, and all his armour covered over with the cloak of peace.
+Round the base of it was written
+
+    “When a heart in stone doth move,
+    Then your lover I may prove;
+    But until the marvel’s done,
+    Fruitlessly your wars are won.”
+
+The Queen looked once at the statue, and for a long time after never
+looked away; and when at last she did her heart had been taken captive.
+Then she looked at the words beneath, and the red flush that rose to her
+face was not gone when the last of her army passed out of the city gates
+to carry war into the country of the man who had dared thus to speak
+scorn of her.
+
+For a whole year the White King fought with the forces she sent against
+him; but when all the other kings came to her aid, then, stronghold by
+stronghold, all his cities were taken, and his lands were laid waste and
+their villages burnt, and nothing but defeat and ruin remained.
+
+Yet in the last battle, when his enemies thought to have him a safe
+prisoner, all of a sudden they found that the White King had disappeared.
+
+Back came the Queen’s armies in triumph with their allies, and the
+conquered territory was added as one more to the many that formed her
+realm. But the Queen sighed as she looked at the White King’s statue, and
+her triumph grew bitter to her. Day by day, as she looked at the calm
+marble face, her love for it increased, and she owned sadly to herself,
+“He whom I have conquered has conquered me!”
+
+Of the lost King himself no tidings could be learned, though search was
+made far and wide. Minstrels came to the court, and sang of his great
+deeds in fighting against odds, but of his end they sang variously. Some
+sang that he lay buried beneath the thickest of the slain; others that
+from his last battle he had been carried by good fairies, and that after
+he had been healed of his wounds, he would return in a hundred years and
+recover his kingdom.
+
+One minstrel came to stay at the court, who sang of ruined homes and
+wasted fields, and a happy land laid desolate, and how its King wandered
+friendless and unknown through the world, hiding himself in disguise,
+sometimes in the cottages of the poor, and sometimes in the dwellings of
+the rich. But from no one could the Queen learn any news that satisfied
+her, or gave hope that he would at last bend down his pride, and come and
+sue to her for forgiveness.
+
+Wishing to have a hiding place for her grief, she caused the statue to
+be set up in a green glade in the most lonely part of the gardens; and
+there often she would go and gaze on the calm noble face (whose closed
+eyes seemed even now to disdain her love), and would wonder how long a
+queen’s heart took to break.
+
+But after a time she thought, “Though I may never win the love of the
+White King for my own, is there no way by which my passion can assuage
+itself, when by lifting my finger I can summon half fairyland to my aid?”
+
+So she called to her the most powerful Fairy she knew, and taking her
+into the green glade, began sighing and weeping in front of the White
+King’s statue. “This,” she said, “is the image of the only man on earth
+I can love! But the man himself is lost, gone I know not where; and my
+heart is breaking for grief! Give this statue a life and a heart, and
+teach it to love me, else soon I shall surely be dead!”
+
+The Fairy said to her, “All the might of fairyland could not do so much;
+but a little of it I can do; and if Fate is kind to you, Fate may bring
+the rest of it to pass.”
+
+“How much can you do?” asked the Queen.
+
+“This only,” said the Fairy, “but even that you must do for yourself: I
+can but show you the way. Stone is stone, and out of stone I cannot make
+a heart; but a heart may grow into it, and this is the way to compass it.
+
+“You must find first a man who is loved, but does not love (for if he
+loves, the statue’s heart when it wakes will turn from you); and him you
+must kill with your own hand, and take out his heart and bury it beneath
+the feet of the statue. Then I will work my charms, and gradually, as a
+flower draws its life out of the ground, so the statue will draw life out
+of the human heart buried below. And after a little time you will see it
+move, and in a little time more its senses will come, and it will be able
+to hear, and see, and speak. But full life will not come to it until it
+has learned to love. Then, so soon as it learns to love, it will become
+no longer stone, but a human being.”
+
+But the Queen said, “Supposing its love were to turn from me to another,
+where should I be then?”
+
+“Surely,” said the Fairy, “the secret will be your own, and the watching
+of its life as it grows will be yours. Your voice it will hear, your
+face it will see; whom, then, will it learn to love more than you?”
+
+“Wait, then, till I have found the man,” said the Queen, “and we will do
+this thing between us!”
+
+She searched long among her court for some man whose heart was whole, but
+who was himself loved. Generally, however, she found it was all the other
+way. There was not a man at the court who was not in love, or did not
+think himself so; and if there were one who had no thought of love, he
+was too poor and mean for the love of any woman to be his.
+
+But one day the Queen heard a minstrel in the palace court-yard singing
+and making merry against love. It was that same minstrel who sang only
+sad songs of the White King’s lands laid waste and himself a wanderer:
+a fellow with a dark sunburnt face, and thick hair hanging over his
+eyes. And as he sang and rattled his jests at the courtiers who stood by
+to listen, the Queen noticed one of her waiting-women looking out of a
+small lattice, who, as she watched the singer’s face, and listened to his
+words, had tears running fast down out of her eyes.
+
+“Is this a case,” thought the Queen, “of a man who is loved but who does
+not love?”
+
+She sent for the minstrel, and said to him, when he stood bending his
+head before her, “Is this pretty scorn that you cast on love earnest or
+jest?”
+
+“Nay,” he answered, “I jest in good earnest; for to speak of love in
+earnest is to jest about it.”
+
+“So,” said the Queen, “you are heart-whole?”
+
+“Why,” said the minstrel, “I doubt if a mouse could find its way in; and
+if I am heart-whole in your presence, I ought to be safe from all the
+world!”
+
+“Now,” thought the Queen, “if only my waiting-woman answers the test,
+here is the heart I will have out!”
+
+Then she bade the minstrel follow her to where stood the White King’s
+statue, bidding him sit down under it and sing her more of his rhymes
+about love.
+
+So the minstrel crossed his legs in the long grass and sang. His song
+became bitter to the Queen’s ears, for he took the words that were round
+the statue, and rhymed them and chimed them, and threw them laughing in
+the Queen’s face. She hated him so that she could have poisoned him; but
+she remembered that his life was necessary for her experiment to reach
+its end. So she sent instead for a sleepy wine, which she gave him to
+drink, and presently his voice grew thick and his head dropped down upon
+his breast, and his legs slid out and brought him down level with the
+grass. When night came on she left him soundly sleeping with his head
+between the feet of the White King’s statue.
+
+Then she sent for the waiting-woman and said, “Go down to the White
+King’s statue, and find for me my handkerchief which I have dropped
+there.” But as the girl went, the Queen stole secretly after her, and
+watched her come to where the minstrel lay asleep.
+
+And when the waiting-maid saw him lying so, with his face thrown back,
+she knelt down in the grass by his side, and putting her arms softly
+about him, kissed him upon the lips over and over again as though she
+could never come to an end, and her tears dropped down on to his face,
+and, as if her mind were gone mad for love of him, the Queen heard her
+sighing, “Oh, White King, my White King, my Beloved, whom I love, but
+who loves me not!”
+
+As soon as the waiting-maid was gone, the Queen came softly to the place,
+and with a sharp knife she cut out the minstrel’s heart and buried it at
+the base of the statue.
+
+In the morning the minstrel was found lying dead, with his heart gone;
+and when they washed the dead face and put back the hair that covered the
+eyes, they found that it was the White King himself.
+
+That day, and for many days after, there were two women weeping in the
+palace: one was the Queen and the other was the waiting-woman. But the
+body of the White King they buried close by the statue in the green glade.
+
+Now presently, when the first violence of her grief was over, the Queen
+came to look at the place; and, sure enough, the Fairy had been there
+with her spells. When the wind blew the statue swayed gently like a tree
+in the wind.
+
+The Queen caused gates and barriers to be put up so that no one should
+enter the glade but herself; only Love found a way, and at night, when
+all the world was asleep, the waiting-woman crept through a loose pale
+in the barriers, and came to moan over the place where her lover had been
+slain.
+
+All night she would lie with her arms round the feet of the White King’s
+statue, and dream of the dead minstrel whom she had loved and known
+through all his disguise. And all night long her lips would murmur his
+name, and whisper over and over again the sad story of her love.
+
+And presently, as the statue drew life from the heart buried beneath its
+feet, its ears were opened and it heard.
+
+In the daytime the Queen would come and sit before it and whisper to it
+of love, offering it all the gifts of riches and power that are in the
+hands of kings to give; but at night came the waiting-woman and offered
+it only love.
+
+Out of the ground the Queen saw grow a small plant, that began to creep
+upwards and to wind itself round the base of the statue; and when she saw
+that its flower was the deadly nightshade, her heart trembled and her
+conscience made her afraid.
+
+But the waiting-maid, when she saw it, picked the sad blossoms and made a
+crown for the statue’s head as of pale amethyst and gold: for she said to
+herself, “Down below my dear lies dead, and the roots of this flower are
+in his hair.”
+
+One day as the Queen came into the glade, she heard the dead minstrel’s
+voice, and her heart shook with terror as she saw the statue open its
+white lips and sing, and recognised the tune and the words as those which
+had made her heart feel so bitter against him; for she thought, “What if
+he knows that it is I who have slain him?”
+
+Now that she saw that the stone had its five senses, and could see and
+speak and hear, she pleaded to it all day out of the greatness of her
+grief and her love. But the statue never returned her word.
+
+At night, lying with her face bowed between the White King’s statue’s
+feet, the waiting-woman knew nothing of all this change; only the statue
+heard and saw and knew. And at last one day as her tears dropped on them,
+she felt the feet grow warm between her hands; and a voice over her head
+that she remembered and loved, said, “Little heart, why are you weeping
+so?”
+
+In the morning the Queen came and found the statue gone. There on the
+pedestal was only the print of his feet, half covered by the deadly
+nightshade which had climbed up to his knees and fallen. There it lay
+heavy and half-withered, clasping the hollows where his feet had been.
+
+The Queen knelt down and caught the bare stone pedestal in her arms. “Oh,
+Love,” she cried, “have you left me? Oh, White King, my White King, have
+you betrayed me?” And as she clung there weeping, her lips touched the
+deadly nightshade; and the nightshade thrilled, and felt joy give new
+life down into its roots.
+
+It reached up and laid its arms about the Queen, about her throat, and
+about her feet and about her waist. “Dearly, dearly we love each other,”
+said the nightshade, “do we not?”
+
+At night the courtiers came, and found only a dead Queen lying, and the
+statue gone.
+
+But the White King had gone home to his own land to marry the
+waiting-woman.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE HERONS
+
+  _TO_
+  AUDREY AND VERONICA
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE HERONS
+
+A long time ago there lived a King and a Queen who loved each other
+dearly. They had both fallen in love at first sight; and as their love
+began so it went on through all their life. Yet this, which was the cause
+of all their happiness, was the cause also of all their misfortunes.
+
+In his youth, when he was a beautiful young bachelor, the King had had
+the ill-luck to attract the heart of a jealous and powerful Fairy; and
+though he never gave her the least hope or encouragement, when she heard
+that his love had been won at first sight by a mere mortal, her rage and
+resentment knew no bounds. She said nothing, however, but bided her time.
+
+After they had been married a year the Queen presented her husband with a
+little daughter; before she was yet a day old she was the most beautiful
+object in the world, and life seemed to promise her nothing but fortune
+and happiness.
+
+The family Fairy came to the blessing of the new-born; and she, looking
+at it as it lay beautifully asleep in its cradle, and seeing that it had
+already as much beauty and health as the heart could desire, promised it
+love as the next best gift it was within her power to offer. The Queen,
+who knew how much happiness her own love had brought her, was kissing the
+good Fairy with all the warmth of gratitude, when a black kite came and
+perched upon the window-sill crying: “And I will give her love at first
+sight! The first living thing that she sets eyes on she shall love to
+distraction, whether it be man or monster, prince or pauper, bird, beast
+or reptile.” And as the wicked Fairy spoke she clapped her wings, and
+up through the boards of the floor, and out from under the bed, and in
+through the window, came a crowd of all the ugliest shapes in the world.
+Thick and fast they came, gathering about the cradle and lifting their
+heads over the edge of it, waiting for the poor little Princess to wake
+up and fall in love at first sight with one of them.
+
+Luckily the child was asleep; and the good Fairy, after driving away the
+black kite and the crowd of beasts it had called to its aid, wrapped
+the Princess up in a shawl and carried her away to a dark room where no
+glimmer of light could get in.
+
+She said to the Queen: “Till I can devise a better way, you must keep her
+in the dark; and when you take her into the open air you must blindfold
+her eyes. Some day, when she is of a fit age, I will bring a handsome
+Prince for her; and only to him shall you unblindfold her at last, and
+make love safe for her.”
+
+She went, leaving the King and Queen deeply stricken with grief over the
+harm which had befallen their daughter. They did not dare to present
+even themselves before her eyes lest love for them, fatal and consuming,
+should drive her to distraction. In utter darkness the Queen would sit
+and cherish her daughter, clasping her to her breast, and calling her by
+all sweet names; but the little face, except by stealth when it was sound
+asleep, she never dared to see, nor did the baby-Princess know the face
+of the mother who loved her.
+
+By and by, however, the family Fairy came again, saying: “Now, I have a
+plan by which your child may enjoy the delights of seeing, and no ill
+come of it.” And she caused to be made a large chamber, the whole of one
+side of which was a mirror. High up in the opposite wall were windows so
+screened that from below no one could look out of them, but across on
+to the mirror came all the sweet sights of the world, glimpses of wood
+and field, and the sun and the moon and the stars, and of every bird as
+it flew by. So the little Princess was brought and set in a screened
+place looking towards the mirror, and there her eyes learned gradually
+all the beautiful things of the world. Over the screen, in the glass
+before her, she learned to know her mother’s face, and to love it dearly
+in a gentle child-like fashion; and when she could talk she became very
+wise, understanding all that was told her about the danger of looking at
+anything alive, except by its reflection in the glass.
+
+When she went out into the open air for her health, she always wore a
+bandage over her eyes, lest she should look, and love something too
+well: but in the chamber of the mirror her eyes were free to see whatever
+they could. The good Fairy, making herself invisible, came and taught
+her to read and make music, and draw; so that before she was fifteen she
+was the most charming and accomplished, as well as the most beautiful
+Princess of her day.
+
+At last the Fairy said that the time was come for her world of
+reflections to be made real, and she went away to fetch the ideal Prince
+that the Princess might at first sight fall in love with him.
+
+The very day after she was gone, as the morning was fine, the Princess
+went out with one of her maids for a walk through the woods. Over her
+patient eyes she wore a bandage of green silk, through which she felt the
+sunlight fall pleasantly.
+
+Out of doors the Princess knew most things by their sounds. She passed
+under rustling leaves, and along by the side of running water; and at
+last she heard the silence of the water, and knew that she was standing
+by the great fish-pond in the middle of the wood. Then she said to her
+waiting-woman, “Is there not some great bird fishing out there, for I
+hear the dipping of his bill, and the water falling off it as he draws
+out the fish?”
+
+And just as she was saying that, the wicked Fairy, who had long bided her
+time, coming softly up from behind, pushed the waiting-woman off the bank
+into the deep water of the pond. Then she snatched away the silk bandage,
+and before the Princess had time to think or close her eyes, she had lost
+her heart to a great heron, that was standing half-way up to his feathers
+fishing among the reeds.
+
+The Princess, with her eyes set free, laughed for joy at the sight of
+him. She stretched out her arms from the bank and cried most musically
+for the bird to come to her; and he came in grave stately fashion, with
+trailing legs, and slow sobbing creak of his wings, and settled down on
+the bank beside her. She drew his slender neck against her white throat,
+and laughed and cried with her arms round him, loving him so that she
+forgot all in the world beside. And the heron looked gravely at her with
+kind eyes, and, bird-like, gave her all the love he could, but not more;
+and so, presently, casting his grey wings abroad, lifted himself and
+sailed slowly back to his fishing among the reeds.
+
+The waiting-woman had got herself out of the water, and stood wringing
+her clothes and her hands beside the Princess. “O, sweet mistress,” she
+cried, with lamentation, “now is all the evil come about which it was our
+whole aim to avoid! And what, and what will the Queen your mother say?”
+
+But the Princess answered, smiling, “Foolish girl, I had no thought of
+what happiness meant till now! See you where my love is gone? and did
+you notice the bend of his neck, and the exceeding length of his legs,
+and the stretch of his grey wings as he flew? This pond is his hall of
+mirrors, wherein he sees the reflection of all his world. Surely I, from
+my hall of mirrors, am the true mate for him!”
+
+Her maid, seeing how far the evil had gone, and that no worse could now
+happen, ran back to the palace and curdled all the court’s blood with
+her news. The King and the Queen and all their nobility rushed down,
+and there they found the Princess with the heron once more in her arms,
+kissing and fondling it with all the marks of a sweet and maidenly
+passion. “Dear mother,” she said, as soon as she saw the Queen, “the
+happiness, which you feared would be sorrow, has come; and it is such
+happiness I have no name for it! And the evil that you so dreaded, see
+how sweet it is! And how sweet it is to see all the world with my own
+eyes and you also at last!” And for the first time in her life she kissed
+her mother’s face in the full light of day.
+
+But her mother hung sobbing upon her neck, “O, my darling, my beautiful,”
+she wept, “does your heart belong for ever to this grey bird?”
+
+Her daughter answered, “He is more than all the world to me! Is he not
+goodly to look upon? Have you considered the bend of his neck, the length
+of his legs, and the waving of his wings; his skill also when he fishes:
+what imagination, what presence of mind!”
+
+“Alas, alas,” sorrowed the Queen, “dear daughter, is this all true to
+you?”
+
+“Mother,” cried the Princess, clinging to her with entreaty, “is all the
+world blind but me?”
+
+The heron had become quite fond of the Princess; wherever she went it
+followed her, and, indeed, without it nowhere would she go. Whenever it
+was near her, the Princess laughed and sang, and when it was out of her
+sight she became sad as night. All the courtiers wept to see her in such
+bondage. “Ah,” said she, “your eyes have been worn out with looking at
+things so long; mine have been kept for me in a mirror.”
+
+When the good family Fairy came (for she was at once sent for by the
+Queen, and told of all that had happened), she said, “Dear Madam, there
+are but two things you can do: either you can wring the heron’s neck, and
+leave the Princess to die of grief; or you can make the Princess happy in
+her own way, by——” Her voice dropped, and she looked from the King to the
+Queen before she went on. “At her birth I gave your daughter love for my
+gift; now it is hers, will you let her keep it?”
+
+The King and the Queen looked softly at each other. “Do not take love
+from her,” said they, “let her keep it!”
+
+“There is but one way,” answered the Fairy.
+
+“Do not tell me the way,” said the Queen weeping, “only let the way be!”
+
+So they went with the Fairy down to the great pond, and there sat the
+Princess, with the grey heron against her heart. She smiled as she saw
+them come. “I see good in your hearts toward me!” she cried. “Dear
+godmother, give me the thing that I want, that my love may be happy!”
+
+Then the Fairy stroked her but once with her wand, and two grey herons
+suddenly rose up from the bank, and sailed away to a hiding-place in the
+reeds.
+
+The Fairy said to the Queen, “You have made your daughter happy; and
+still she will have her voice and her human heart, and will remember you
+with love and gratitude; but her greatest love will be to the grey heron,
+and her home among the reeds.”
+
+So the changed life of the Princess began; every day her mother went down
+to the pool and called, and the Princess came rising up out of the reeds,
+and folded her grey wings over her mother’s heart. Every day her mother
+said, “Daughter of mine, are you happy?”
+
+And the Princess answered her, “Yes, for I love and am loved.”
+
+Yet each time the mother heard more and more of a note of sadness come
+into her daughter’s voice; and at last one day she said, “Answer me
+truly, as the mother who brought you into the world, whether you be happy
+in your heart of hearts or no?”
+
+Then the heron-Princess laid her head on the Queen’s heart, and said,
+“Mother, my heart is breaking with love!”
+
+“For whom, then?” asked the Queen astonished.
+
+“For my grey heron, whom I love, and who loves me so much. And yet it is
+love that divides us, for I am still troubled with a human heart, and
+often it aches with sorrow because all the love in it can never be fully
+understood or shared by my heron; and I have my human voice left, and
+that gives me a hundred things to say all day, for which there is no word
+in herons’ language, and so he cannot understand them. Therefore these
+things only make a gulf between him and me. For all the other grey herons
+in the pools there is happiness, but not for me who have too big a heart
+between my wings.”
+
+Her mother said softly, “Wait, wait, little heron-daughter, and it shall
+be well with you!” Then she went to the Fairy and said, “My daughter’s
+heart is lonely among the reeds, for the grey heron’s love covers but
+half of it. Give her some companions of her own kind that her hours may
+become merry again!”
+
+So the Fairy took and turned five of the Princess’s lady’s-maids into
+herons, and sent them down to the pool.
+
+The five herons stood each on one leg in the shallows of the pool,
+and cried all day long; and their tears fell down into the water and
+frightened away the fish that came their way. For they had human hearts
+that cried out to be let go. “O, cruel, cruel,” they wept, whenever the
+heron-Princess approached, “see what we suffer because of you, and what
+they have made of us for your sake!”
+
+The Princess came to her mother and said, “Dear mother, take them away,
+for their cry wearies me, and the pool is bitter with their tears! They
+only awake the human part of my heart that wants to sleep; presently, may
+be, if it is let alone, it will forget itself.”
+
+Her mother said, “It is my coming every day also that keeps it awake.”
+The Princess answered, “This sorrow belongs to my birthright; you must
+still come; but for the others, let the Fairy take them away.”
+
+So the Fairy came and released the five lady’s-maids whom she had changed
+into herons. And they came up out of the water, stripping themselves of
+their grey feather-skins and throwing them back into the pool. The Fairy
+said, “You foolish maids, you have thrown away a gift that you should
+have valued; these skins you could have kept and held as heirlooms in
+your family.”
+
+The five maids answered, “We want to forget that there are such things as
+herons in the world!”
+
+After much thought the Queen said to the Fairy, “You have changed a
+Princess into a heron, and five maids into herons and back again; cannot
+you change one heron into a Prince?” But the Fairy answered sadly, “Our
+power has limits; we can bring down, but we cannot bring up, if there be
+no heart to answer our call. The five maids only followed their hearts,
+that were human, when I called them back; but a heron has only a heron’s
+heart, and unless his heart become too great for a bird and he earn a
+human one, I cannot change him to a higher form.” “How can he earn a
+human one?” asked the Queen. “Only if he love the Princess so well that
+his love for her becomes stronger than his life,” answered the Fairy.
+“Then he will have earned a human body, and then I can give him the form
+that his heart suits best. There may be a chance, if we wait for it and
+are patient, for the Princess’s love is great and may work miracles.”
+
+A little while after this, the Queen watching, saw that the two herons
+were making a nest among the reeds. “What have you there?” said
+the mother to her daughter. “A little hollow place,” answered the
+heron-Princess, “and in it the moon lies.” A little while after she said
+again, “What have you there, now, little daughter?” And her daughter
+answered, “Only a small hollow space; but in it two moons lie.”
+
+The Queen told the family Fairy how in a hollow of the reeds lay two
+moons. “Now,” said the Fairy, “we will wait no longer. If your daughter’s
+love has touched the heron’s heart and made it grow larger than a bird’s,
+I can help them both to happiness; but if not, then birds they must
+still remain.”
+
+Among the reeds the heron said in bird language to his wife, “Go and
+stretch your wings for a little while over the water; it is weary work
+to wait here so long in the reeds.” The heron-Princess looked at him
+with her bird’s eyes, and all the human love in her heart strove, like a
+fountain that could not get free, to make itself known through them; also
+her tongue was full of the longing to utter sweet words, but she kept
+them back, knowing they were beyond the heron’s power to understand. So
+she answered merely in heron’s language, “Come with me, and I will come!”
+
+They rose, wing beating beside wing; and the reflection of their grey
+breasts slid out under them over the mirror of the pool.
+
+Higher they went and higher, passing over the tree tops, and keeping time
+together as they flew. All at once the wings of the grey heron flagged,
+then took a deep beat; he cried to the heron-Princess, “Turn, and come
+home, yonder there is danger flying to meet us!” Before them hung a
+brown blot in the air, that winged and grew large. The two herons turned
+and flew back. “Rise,” cried the grey heron, “we must rise!” and the
+Princess knew what was behind, and struggled with the whole strength of
+her wings for escape.
+
+The grey heron was bearing ahead on stronger wing. “With me, with me!” he
+cried. “If it gets above us, one of us is dead!” But the falcon had fixed
+his eye on the Princess for his quarry, and flew she fast, or flew she
+slow, there was little chance for her now. Up and up she strained, but
+still she was behind her mate, and still the falcon gained.
+
+The heron swung back to her side; she saw the anguish and fear of his
+downward glance as his head ranged by hers. Past her the falcon went,
+towering for the final swoop.
+
+The Princess cried in heron’s language, “Farewell, dear mate, and
+farewell, two little moons among the reeds!” But the grey heron only kept
+closer to her side.
+
+Overhead the falcon closed in its wings and fell like a dead weight out
+of the clouds. “Drop!” cried the grey heron to his mate.
+
+At his word she dropped; but he stayed, stretching up his wings, and,
+passing between the descending falcon and its prey, caught in his own
+body the death-blow from its beak. Drops of his blood fell upon the
+heron-Princess.
+
+He stricken in body, she in soul, together they fell down to the margin
+of the pool. The falcon still clung fleshing its beak in the neck of its
+prey. The heron-Princess threw back her head, and, darting furiously,
+struck her own sharp bill deep into the falcon’s breast. The bird threw
+out its wings with a hoarse cry and fell back dead, with a little tuft of
+the grey heron’s feathers still upon its beak.
+
+The heron-Princess crouched down, and covered with her wings the dying
+form of her mate; in her sorrow she spoke to him in her own tongue,
+forgetting her bird’s language. The grey heron lifted his head, and,
+gazing tenderly, answered her with a human voice:
+
+“Dear wife,” he said, “at last I have the happiness so long denied to
+me of giving utterance in the speech that is your own to the love that
+you have put into my heart. Often I have heard you speak and have not
+understood; now something has touched my heart, and changed it, so that I
+can both speak and understand.”
+
+“O, beloved!” She laid her head down by his. “The ends of the world
+belong to us now. Lie down, and die gently by my side, and I will die
+with you, breaking my heart with happiness.”
+
+“No,” said the grey heron, “do not die yet! Remember the two little moons
+that lie in the hollow among the reeds.” Then he laid his head down by
+hers, being too weak to say more.
+
+They folded their wings over each other, and closed their eyes; nor did
+they know that the Fairy was standing by them, till she stroked them both
+softly with her wand, saying to each of them the same words:
+
+“Human heart, and human form, come out of the grey heron!”
+
+And out of the grey heron-skins came two human forms; the one was the
+Princess restored again to her own shape, but the other was a beautiful
+youth, with a bird-like look about the eyes, and long slender limbs. The
+Princess, as she gazed on him, found hardly any change, for love remained
+the same, binding him close to her heart; and, grey heron or beautiful
+youth, he was all one to her now.
+
+Then came the Queen, weeping for joy, and embracing them both, and after
+them, the Fairy. “O, how good an ending,” she cried, “has come to that
+terrible dream! Let it never be remembered or mentioned between us more!”
+And she began to lead the way back to the palace.
+
+But the youth, to whom the Fairy gave the name of Prince Heron, turned
+and took up the two heron-skins which he and his wife had let fall, and
+followed, carrying them upon his arm. And as they came past the bed of
+reeds, the Princess went aside, and, stooping down in a certain place
+drew out from thence something which she came carrying, softly wrapped in
+the folds of her gown.
+
+With what rejoicing the Princess and her husband were welcomed by the
+King and all the Court needs not to be told. For a whole month the
+festivities continued; and whenever she showed herself, there was the
+Princess sitting with two eggs in her lap, and her hands over them to
+keep them warm. The King was impatient. “Why cannot you send them down to
+the poultry yard to be hatched?” he said.
+
+But the Princess replied smiling, “My moons are my own, and I will keep
+them to myself.”
+
+“Do you hear?” she said one day, at last; and everybody who listened
+could hear something going “tap, tap,” inside the shells. Presently the
+eggs cracked, and out of each, at the same moment, came a little grey
+heron.
+
+When she saw that they were herons, the Queen wrung her hands. “O,
+Fairy,” she cried, “what a disappointment is this! I had hoped two
+beautiful babies would have come out of those shells.”
+
+But the Fairy said, “It is no matter. Half of their hearts are human
+already; birds’ hearts do not beat so. If you wish it, I can change
+them.” So she stroked them softly with her wand, saying to each, “Human
+heart, and human form, come out of the grey heron!”
+
+Yet she had to stroke them three times before they would turn; and she
+said to the Princess, “My dear, you were too satisfied with your lot when
+you laid these eggs. I doubt if more than a quarter of them is human.”
+
+“I was very satisfied,” said the Princess, and she laughed across to her
+husband.
+
+At last, however, on the third stroke of the wand, the heron’s skins
+dropped off, and they changed into a pair of very small babies, a boy
+and a girl. But the difference between them and other children was, that
+instead of hair, their heads were covered with a fluff of downy grey
+feathers; also they had queer, round, bird-like eyes, and were able to
+sleep standing.
+
+Now, after this the happiness of the Princess was great; but the Fairy
+said to her, “Do not let your husband see the heron-skins again for some
+while, lest with the memory a longing for his old life should return to
+him and take him away from you. Only by exchange with another can he ever
+get back his human form again, if he surrenders it of his own free will.
+And who is there so poor that he would willingly give up his human form
+to become a bird?”
+
+So the Princess took the four coats of feather—her own and her husband’s
+and her two children’s—and hid them away in a closet of which she alone
+kept the key. It was a little gold key, and to make it safe she hung it
+about her neck, and wore it night and day.
+
+The Prince said to her, “What is that little key that you wear always
+hung round your neck?”
+
+She answered him, “It is the key to your happiness and mine. Do not ask
+more than that!” At that there was a look in his face that made her say,
+“You _are_ happy, are you not?”
+
+He kissed her, saying, “Happy indeed! Have I not you to make me so?” Yet
+though, indeed, he told no untruth, and was happy whenever she was with
+him, there were times when a restlessness and a longing for wings took
+hold of him; for, as yet, the life of a man was new and half strange to
+him, and a taint of his old life still mixed itself with his blood. But
+to her he was ashamed to say what might seem a complaint against his
+great fortune; so when she said “happiness,” he thought, “Is it just the
+turning of that key that I want before my happiness can be perfect?”
+
+Therefore, one night when the early season of spring made his longing
+strong in him, he took the key from the Princess while she slept, and
+opened the little closet in which hung the four feather coats. And when
+he saw his own, all at once he remembered the great pools of water,
+and how they lay in the shine and shadow of the moonlight, while the
+fish rose in rings upon their surface. And at that so great a longing
+came into him to revisit his old haunts that he reached out his hand and
+took down the heron-skin from its nail and put it over himself; so that
+immediately his old life took hold of him, and he flew out of the window
+in the form of a grey heron.
+
+In the morning the Princess found the key gone from her neck, and her
+husband’s place empty. She went in haste to the closet, and there stood
+the door wide with the key in it, and only three heron-skins hanging
+where four had used to be.
+
+Then she came crying to the family Fairy, “My husband has taken his
+heron-skin and is gone! Tell me what I can do!”
+
+The Fairy pitied her with all her heart, but could do nothing. “Only by
+exchange,” said she, “can he get back his human shape; and who is there
+so poor that he would willingly lose his own form to become a bird? Only
+your children, who are but half human, can put their heron-skins on and
+off as they like and when they like.”
+
+In deep grief the Princess went to look for her husband down by the pools
+in the wood. But now his shame and sorrow at having deceived her were so
+great that as soon as he heard her voice he hid himself among the reeds,
+for he knew now that, having put on his heron-skin again, he could not
+take it off unless some one gave him a human form in exchange.
+
+At last, however, so pitiful was the cry of the Princess for him, that he
+could bear to hear it no more; but rising up from the reeds came trailing
+to her sadly over the water. “Ah, dear love!” she said when he was come
+to her, “if I had not distrusted you, you would not have deceived me:
+thus, for my fault we are punished.” So she sorrowed, and he answered her:
+
+“Nay, dear love, for if I had not deceived you, you would not have
+distrusted me. I thought I was not happy, yet I feared to tell it you.”
+Thus they sorrowed together, both laying on themselves the blame and the
+burden.
+
+Then she said to him: “Be here for me to-night, for now I must go; but
+then I shall return.”
+
+She went back to the palace, and told her mother of all that had
+happened. “And now,” she said, “you who know where my happiness lies will
+not forbid me from following it; for my heart is again with the grey
+heron.” And the Queen wept, but would not say her no.
+
+So that night the Princess went and kissed her children as they slept
+standing up in their beds, with their funny feather-pates to one side;
+and then she took down her skin of feathers and put it on, and became
+changed once more into a grey heron. And again she went up to the two in
+their cots, and kissed their birdish heads saying: “They who can change
+at will, being but half human, they will come and visit us in the great
+pool by the wood, and bring back word of us here.”
+
+In the morning the Princess was gone, and the two children when they woke
+looked at each other and said: “Did we dream last night?”
+
+They both answered each other “Yes, first we dreamed that our mother
+came and kissed us; and we liked that. And then we dreamed that a grey
+heron came and kissed us, and we liked that better still!” They waved
+their arms up and down. “Why have we not wings?” they kept asking. All
+day long they did this, playing that they were birds. If a window were
+opened, it was with the greatest difficulty that they were kept from
+trying to fly through.
+
+In the Court they were known as the “Feather-pates”; nothing could they
+be taught at all. When they were rebuked they would stand on one leg and
+sigh with their heads on one side; but no one ever saw tears come out of
+their birdish eyes.
+
+Now at night they would dream that two grey herons came and stood by
+their bedsides, kissing them; “And where in the world,” they said when
+they woke, “_are_ our wings?”
+
+One day, wandering about in the palace, they came upon the closet in
+which hung the two little feather coats. “O!!!” they cried, and opened
+hard bright eyes at each other, nodding, for now they knew what they
+would do. “If we told, they would be taken off us,” they said; and they
+waited till it was night. Then they crept back and took the two little
+coats from their pegs, and, putting them on, were turned into two young
+herons.
+
+Through the window they flew, away down to the great fish-pond in the
+wood. Their father and mother saw them coming, and clapped their wings
+for joy. “See,” they said, “our children come to visit us, and our hearts
+are left to us to love with. What further happiness can we want?” But
+when they were not looking at each other they sighed.
+
+All night long the two young herons stayed with their parents; they
+bathed, and fished, and flew, till they were weary. Then the Princess
+showed them the nest among the reeds, and told them all the story of
+their lives.
+
+“But it is much nicer to be herons than to be real people,” said the
+young ones, sadly, and became very sorrowful when dawn drew on, and their
+mother told them to go back to the palace and hang up the feather coats
+again, and be as they had been the day before.
+
+Long, long the day now seemed to them; they hardly waited till it was
+night before they took down their feather-skins, and, putting them on,
+flew out and away to the fish-pond in the wood.
+
+So every night they went, when all in the palace were asleep; and in the
+morning came back before anyone was astir, and were found by their nurses
+lying demurely between the sheets, just as they had been left the night
+before.
+
+One day the Queen when she went to see her daughter said to her, “My
+child, your two children are growing less like human beings and more
+like birds every day. Nothing will they learn or do, but stand all day
+flapping their arms up and down, and saying, ‘Where are our wings, where
+are our wings?’ The idea of one of them ever coming to the throne makes
+your father’s hair stand on end under his crown.”
+
+“Oh, mother,” said the heron-Princess, “I have made a sad bed for you and
+my father to lie on!”
+
+One day the two children said to each other, “Our father and mother
+are sad, because they want to be real persons again, instead of having
+wings and catching fish the way we like to do. Let us give up being real
+persons, which is all so much trouble, and such a want of exercise, and
+make them exchange with us!” But when the two young herons went down to
+the pond and proposed it to them, their parents said, “You are young;
+you do not know what you would be giving up.” Nor would they consent to
+it at all.
+
+Now one morning it happened that the Feather-pates were so late in
+returning to the palace that the Queen, coming into their chamber,
+found the two beds empty; and just as she had turned away to search for
+them elsewhere, she heard a noise of wings and saw the two young herons
+come flying in through the window. Then she saw them take off their
+feather-skins and hang them up in the closet, and after that go and lie
+down in their beds so as to look as if they had been there all night.
+
+The Queen struck her hands together with horror at the sight, but she
+crept away softly, so that they did not know they had been found out.
+But as soon as they were out of their beds and at play in another part
+of the palace, the Queen went to the closet, and setting fire to the two
+heron-skins where they hung, burnt them till not a feather of them was
+left, and only a heap of grey ashes remained to tell what had become of
+them.
+
+At night, when the Feather-pates went to their cupboards and found their
+skins gone, and saw what had become of them, their grief knew no bounds.
+They trembled with fear and rage, and tears rained out of their eyes as
+they beheld themselves deprived of their bird bodies and made into real
+persons for good and all.
+
+“We won’t be real persons!” they cried. But for all their crying they
+knew no way out of it. They made themselves quite ill with grief; and
+that night, for the first time since they had found their way to the
+closet, they stayed where their nurses had put them, and did not even
+stand up in their beds to go to sleep. There they lay with gasping mouth,
+and big bird-like eyes all languid with grief, and hollow grey cheeks.
+
+Presently their father and mother came seeking for them, wondering why
+they had not come down to the fish-pond as they were wont. “Where are
+you, my children?” cried the heron-Princess, putting her head in through
+the window.
+
+“Here we are, both at death’s door!” they cried. “Come and see us die!
+Our wicked granddam has burnt our feather-skins and made us into real
+persons for ever and ever, Amen. But we will die rather!”
+
+The parent herons, when they heard that, flew in through the window and
+bent down over the little ones’ beds.
+
+The two children reached up their arms. “Give us your feathers!” they
+cried. “We shall die if you don’t! We _will_ die if you don’t! O, do!”
+But still the parent birds hesitated, nor knew what to do.
+
+“Bend down, and let me whisper something!” said the boy to his father:
+and “Bend down, and whisper!” cried the girl to her mother. And father
+and mother bent down over the faces of their sick children. Then these,
+both together, caught hold of them, and crying, “Human heart, and
+human form, exchange with the grey heron!” pulled off their parents’
+feather-skins, and put them upon themselves.
+
+And there once more stood Prince Heron and the Princess in human shape,
+while the two children had turned into herons in their place.
+
+The young herons laughed and shouted and clapped their wings for joy.
+“Are you not happy now?” cried they. And when their parents saw the joy,
+not only in their children’s eyes, but in each other’s, and felt their
+hearts growing glad in the bodies they had regained, then they owned
+that the Feather-pates had been wise in their generation, and done well
+according to their lights.
+
+So it came about that the Prince and the Princess lived happily ever
+after, and the two young herons lived happily also, and were the
+best-hearted birds the world ever saw.
+
+In course of time the Prince and Princess had other children, who pleased
+the old King better than the first had done. But the parents loved
+none better than the two who lived as herons by the great fish-pond in
+the wood; nor could there be greater love than was found between these
+and their younger brothers and sisters, whose nature it was to be real
+persons.
+
+
+
+
+SYRINGA
+
+  _TO_
+  DORA
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+SYRINGA
+
+A great many years ago there lived a King who spent his days in
+travelling about to find the woman he could love and take to be his wife.
+Though the richest and most beautiful princesses offered him their hands
+in marriage, for none of them could he entertain the smallest affection.
+“It seems that I have had a dream,” he said. “Somewhere my Love is, but I
+have not found her yet!”
+
+In those days the country over which he was lord had two Kings, one
+reigned and the other ruled; and as long as this was so, since his
+brother-King who ruled was married, his councillors allowed him who
+merely reigned to wander about at will in pursuit of his strange fancy.
+
+When, however, the King who ruled died without leaving an heir, then
+those same councillors said, “This will not do; the State can wait no
+longer. Princes are born, and Kings die; love or no love, for your
+people’s sake you must marry!”
+
+“Then why does he not marry me?” said the Queen-widow of the King that
+ruled.
+
+The King that reigned said, “Rather than marry her I would marry my
+scullery-maid!” He became so terrified at the thought of her proposal
+that he took horse secretly by night, and rode away into the most
+secluded and uninhabited parts of his dominion.
+
+Now here, as he rode along over many miles of barren moor and hill, one
+day, crossing a high ridge, he met the wind coming softly up out of the
+valley below him, and its breath upon his face was full of the perfume of
+some sweet flower. At that his heart, which had been so long listless and
+sad, seemed to awake within him. “Flower of my dream!” he cried; and soon
+saw below him, nestling in a corner of the valley, a small garden half
+hidden in the embrace of tall girdling trees.
+
+Down he went joyfully, following the fragrant call till he came to the
+entrance of the place; and there, dismounting from his horse, he entered
+its green ways. A natural lawn mounted and hollowed before him in glossy
+sweeps, flowering shrubs dotted its heights, for the summer of the year
+was begun; but the scent which had taken hold of his heart came from a
+great bush of white bloom in the centre of all.
+
+Under the bush lay a young and beautiful girl, and the blossoms were
+sprinkling down, one by one, like dropped kisses upon her dear face. So
+soon as the King saw her he knew that his search was at an end, and that
+his dream of years had come true.
+
+Their glad eyes met softly through the flowers; and he said, “You had but
+to breathe for me, and I came!” For all her face and breath smelt to him
+of the blossoms she lay under.
+
+She answered, “Three years I have lain with my ear upon the ground, and
+heard you going and coming, searching the world through; and now at last
+you are come!” She rose up to the King’s embrace, and they were to each
+other like old lovers long parted and at last met, so long had they
+known of love in their dreams.
+
+Twilight was beginning as they turned and went out of the garden. The
+King said, “What is your name all these years?”
+
+And she answered him with a voice like a bird singing, “Syringa my name
+was, Syringa my name is, and will be while life lasts.”
+
+When they left the valley and went mounting the side of the hill, a sweet
+wind rose and rose, and came following them. All the way, as they rode,
+white blossoms came showering behind them, falling upon their faces and
+their hair, and whitening the track at their feet. Up to the city gates,
+where all the King’s court and his councillors stood watching and waiting
+for his return, the blossoms kept following them, like little scented
+moths fluttering round them in the darkness.
+
+When the gates were opened, the whole city became full of the scent of
+the bride’s name.
+
+So the marriage of the King who reigned was celebrated with all the joy
+and noise imaginable; for all the people laughed and shouted and clapped
+their hands when their eyes saw the beauty of the new Queen. But the
+dowager Queen, the widow of the King who ruled, put on yellow weeds, and
+shut herself up in a corner of the palace, eating unleavened bread and
+bitter herb sandwiches till all the rejoicings were over.
+
+In a little while, however, she appeared to forget her grief, and,
+concealing her jealousy, made friends with the King who reigned, and with
+his Queen; and the King was glad in his great happiness to think that no
+heart in all the kingdom remained under a cloud.
+
+For nearly a year the happiness of the King and Queen lasted and grew
+perfect. Every day that they lived together they loved each other more
+and more. But the Queen-widow waited and watched till an opportunity for
+her evil working should come in.
+
+Presently people who looked at Syringa’s beauty began to say, “Is not
+such beauty more than human? Where does it come from, and what keeps it
+alive?” And though many in course of time learned to talk like this,
+no one ever seemed to know from whom such talk first came. Later, folk
+began to whisper instead of to talk. “We have heard,” they said, “one
+way by which such beauty can be kept alive, yet only one.” Then others
+were heard saying, “Have you heard that this man’s wife lost her child
+before it was a week old, and knows not where it can be gone; and that
+that man’s wife lost hers in the same way a week before? And who will
+lose hers this week that’s coming, if we don’t know yet, we soon shall
+know!” And shortly, sure enough, all through the city there were mothers
+mourning for the loss of their children, who had gone, none knew where,
+before they were even a week old; and more and more the crowd was taught
+to say, “Look how beautiful the Queen grows!” whenever she walked or rode.
+
+The Queen-widow listened to all this, and laughed. In her own chamber she
+had a cage filled with little blue birds, who cried lamentably all day
+long.
+
+Now, just when all the city-talk and the dark looks of the people had
+grown to a head, Queen Syringa gave birth to a little son; and the King’s
+joy was beyond all bounds. “Now,” thought the Queen-widow, “now or never!
+Now I will ruin her or die!”
+
+She watched her opportunity, till one day she found Syringa lying alone
+upon her couch with the child asleep between her arms.
+
+The wicked Queen saw that Syringa also was asleep. She stooped down over
+the child, whispering a spell, and as she clapped her hands it started
+from between its mother’s arms and flew away in the form of a little blue
+bird.
+
+The Queen-widow did her best to catch the bird, but could not; then she
+took blood, and, smearing the Queen’s hands and face with it, left her
+lying there asleep.
+
+So Syringa was found; and the noise of it went through the city how she
+had killed her own child in order to keep alive her wondrous beauty. The
+King tried with heart and soul not to believe so wicked a story against
+the wife he loved, but the evidence was too strong. When asked, the Queen
+could explain nothing. “When I went to sleep,” she said, “my child was in
+my arms, and when I awoke it was gone!”
+
+Outside the palace all the people were crying for her to be put to death.
+“Give back to their mothers the babies that you have eaten!” they cried.
+
+The King sent for his foster-brother, and told him to take the Queen away
+to some lonely and desolate place, and there to make an end of her. “She
+is too beautiful,” he said, “and I loved her too much. Let her be very
+far away from me when she dies!”
+
+So that night the King’s foster-brother took the Queen, and set out in
+the direction of the waste places and the hills. All the day following
+they journeyed, till toward evening they came to the head of a valley,
+where a wind came to them carrying the rich scent of flowers. The Queen
+lifted her head and took in a deep breath; then she said, “If I have to
+die, let me die under the scent of those flowers!”
+
+They went on till they came to a little garden lying in a curl of the
+valley. There in the centre of a lawn stood the great bush white with
+bloom, and a sweet fragrance blew out of it, filling all that space.
+
+“If I must die,” said the Queen again, “let me lie down and drink in the
+scent of those flowers; afterwards I shall not complain.” So the King’s
+foster-brother gave her leave to go and lie down under the tree, and sat
+down close at hand to keep watch, so that she should not escape.
+
+A small blue bird came and perched upon the bush over her head.
+
+“Syringa, Syringa!” cried the bird, and two white blossoms fell off like
+kisses upon the Queen’s face. She lifted her hands and threw kisses up to
+the flowers, and more and more they came down and settled upon her face.
+
+“Syringa, Syringa!” sang the bird; and, hearing it, the King’s
+foster-brother’s heart became ready to break for grief.
+
+The twilight deepened in the air around. All through the hours the bird
+sang on, and the flowers dropped down like pale tired moths in the dusk
+of the summer’s night, till where the Queen lay became white with a mass
+of blossoms that never stirred.
+
+The heart of the King’s foster-brother grew heavier; “What if, after all,
+she be not wicked but good! To-morrow at sunrise I must kill her.”
+
+“Syringa, Syringa!” cried the bird.
+
+Towards dawn he saw the tree all blossomless, only a great heap of
+petals, like a snow-covered grave, showed where the Queen lay; and the
+song of the bird had stopped.
+
+“If she sleeps now,” thought the King’s foster-brother, “it will be
+merciful.” He drew out his sharp hunting-knife, and went softly up to the
+spot to carry out the King’s command.
+
+So covered was she with blossoms, he could not tell which way lay her
+head; the heaviness of their dying scent almost made him swoon. Softly
+with his hand he brushed the petals apart to find a place where he might
+strike.
+
+How deeply they lay! They seemed to be without end here in the centre of
+all. Presently his hand came upon green grass bent with the weight of
+blossoms, and dank with dew. He shut his eyes and started away, for the
+colour and the touch made a strange sorrow in his heart, and he knew that
+the Queen was not there.
+
+He went away to the furthest part of the garden, and returned, and again
+searched, and still she was not there; only blossoms in a pile, and under
+them green grass.
+
+“Syringa, Syringa!” sang the bird; and now there was a sort of triumph in
+its note.
+
+The King’s foster-brother turned and went back to the city. All the way
+the blossoms drifted and blew after him along the track; till at evening
+he stood at the palace door in a wind of syringa scent, and dead flowers
+blew over his feet as he crossed the threshold.
+
+Then he told the King all that he had seen and heard, and the King knew
+surely that his Queen, who had died so gentle and beloved a death, had
+been innocent of the crime laid to her charge. So great was his grief he
+could not rest; that very night he rose and journeyed till he came by day
+to the little garden; there he found the tree blossomless, and in the
+top of it he heard the blue bird crying, “Syringa, Syringa,” sadly and
+without ceasing.
+
+But to the King there came no sign or sound of his love. He laid his head
+upon the ground at the foot of the tree, sighing, “My love, you lay three
+years with your ear to the ground listening for my feet; now I will lie
+and listen for yours!”
+
+All the grass became wet with the tears of sorrow that the King shed;
+the tree waved and grew more green. In three days new blossoms looked
+out among the leaves; at night they fell upon his face, and he dreamed
+that Syringa’s lips were laid to his ear, and the tale of her betrayal
+whispered to him.
+
+Then, knowing all, but determined for a time to let the truth lie buried
+in his heart, he caused the tree to be lifted from the ground and carried
+back and set secretly in the palace garden. And of all this, and of what
+he knew, he said nothing to the Queen-widow.
+
+To the little blue bird that had followed the tree, and perched in its
+boughs, he said, “Be silent, little blue bird, and do not sing that name
+here.” At his word the little blue bird became silent as death, and sat
+motionless in the heart of the tree, never once breathing Syringa’s name.
+
+At night the Prince would come and press his lips to the leaves of the
+tree and whisper, “Ah, love, how long is my heart to stay broken? And
+when will forgiveness blossom?”
+
+But to the Queen-widow it appeared that the Prince was recovering from
+his grief; and when a year had gone round she began wooing him by
+stealth, seeming to pity him for the sorrow that the wickedness of his
+dead Queen had caused him.
+
+Little by little he seemed to listen and open his heart to her; once he
+said, “All my grief would go if one whom I love could know that my heart,
+which once turned from her, has become wholly hers again.”
+
+When the Queen-widow heard that said, she thought, “Surely now, in a
+short time, all my schemes are to be brought to a good end.”
+
+One day as they walked and talked together in the gardens of the palace,
+they came upon a tree white and covered with blossom. “How I love that
+flower!” said the King; but the Queen-widow as soon as she smelt the
+scent of it turned pale and trembled. Up among the branches sat a little
+blue bird silently.
+
+“Come here, and sit under this tree,” said the King, “and let me speak
+freely, for I am in sore want of a wife!” He drew her close under the
+leaves of the tree. “Here,” he thought, “I will make her speak; she shall
+confess all!” Over them a bough leaned down.
+
+One of its blossoms touched the Queen-widow on the throat. “It has bitten
+me!” she shrieked. The branch sprang away, the whole tree opened and
+waved. Out of it the blossoms flew like a white swarm of angry bees.
+
+“Syringa, Syringa!” cried the bird.
+
+The Queen-widow caught herself by the throat and moaned, and lay down
+upon the grass to die.
+
+As soon as her breath was gone, all the blossoms rose up again like a
+white column of cloud; down into their midst flew the blue bird.
+
+Then, this way and that, the blossoms cast themselves loose into the
+wind, and out of their midst came Syringa herself, carrying her child in
+her arms. At her feet the Queen-widow lay quite dead, with her hand upon
+her throat. The little blue birds in the palace had broken out of their
+cage and were calling for their mothers with childish voices and laughter.
+
+But the King knelt down before Syringa’s feet, pale and trembling,
+seeking pardon for having ever believed in her guilt. Swiftly Queen
+Syringa bent down, and in token of forgiveness held her child’s lips to
+his. Over them both her face and breath were fragrant as a garden full of
+sunshine.
+
+When the King had kissed the child’s lips, she gave him her own.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER’S SHOES
+
+  _TO_
+  MARY AND EMILY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER’S SHOES
+
+A long while ago there lived a young cobbler named Lubin, who, when his
+father died, was left with only the shop and the shoe-leather out of
+which to make his fortune. From morning to night he toiled, making and
+mending the shoes of the poor village folk; but his earnings were small,
+and he seemed never able to get more than three days ahead of poverty.
+
+One day, as he sat working at his window-bench, the door opened, and in
+came a traveller. He had on a pair of long red shoes with pointed ends;
+but of one the seams had split, so that all his toes were coming out of
+it.
+
+The stranger, putting up one foot after the other, took off both shoes,
+and giving that one which wanted cobbling to Lubin, he said: “To-night
+I shall be sleeping here at the inn; have this ready in good time
+to-morrow, for I am in haste to go on!” And having said this he put the
+other shoe into his pocket, and went out of the door barefoot.
+
+“What a funny fellow,” thought Lubin, “not to make the most of one shoe
+when he has it!” But without stopping to puzzle himself he took up the
+to-be-mended shoe and set to work. When it was finished he threw it down
+on the floor behind him, and went on working at his other jobs. He meant
+to work late, for he had not enough money yet to get himself his Sunday’s
+dinner; so when darkness shut in he lighted a rushlight and cobbled away,
+thinking to himself all the while of the roast meat that was to be his
+reward.
+
+It came close on midnight, and he was just putting on the last heel of
+the last pair of shoes when he was aware of a noise on the floor behind
+him. He looked round, and there was the red shoe with the pointed toe,
+cutting capers and prancing about by itself in the middle of the room.
+
+“Peace on earth!” exclaimed Lubin. “I never saw a shoe do a thing so
+tipsy before!” He went up and passed his hand over it and under it, but
+there was nothing to account for its caperings; on it went, up and down,
+toeing and heeling, skipping and sliding, as if for a very wager. Lubin
+could even tell himself the name of the reel and the tune that it was
+dancing to, for all that the other foot was missing. Presently the shoe
+tripped and toppled, falling heel up upon the floor; nor, although Lubin
+watched it for a full hour, did it ever start upon a fresh jig.
+
+Soon after daybreak, when Lubin had but just opened his shutters and sat
+himself down to work, in came the traveller, limping upon bare feet, with
+the shoe’s fellow pointing its red toe out of his pocket. “Oh, so,” he
+said, seeing the other shoe ready mended and waiting for him, “how much
+am I owing you for the job?”
+
+“Just a gold piece,” said Lubin, carelessly, carrying on at his work.
+
+“A gold piece for the mere mending of a shoe!” cried the stranger. “You
+must be either a rogue or a funny fellow.”
+
+“Neither!” said Lubin, “and for mending a shoe my charge is only a penny;
+but for mending _that_ shoe, and for all the worry and temptation to
+make it my own and run off with it—a gold piece!”
+
+“To be sure, you are an honest fellow,” said the traveller, “and honesty
+is a rare gift; though, had you made off with it, I should have soon
+caught you. Still, you were not so wise as to know that, so here’s your
+gold piece for you.” He pulled out a big bag of gold as he spoke, pouring
+its contents out on to the window bench.
+
+“That is a lot of money for a lonely man to carry about,” said Lubin.
+“Are you not afraid?”
+
+“Why, no,” answered the man. “I have a way, so that I can always follow
+it up even if I lose it.” He took two of the gold pieces, and dropped one
+into the sole of each shoe as he was putting them on. “There!” said he,
+“now, if any man steal my money, I need only wait till it is midnight;
+and then I have but to say to my shoes ‘Seek!’ and up they jump, with
+me in them, and carry me to where my stolen property is, were it to the
+world’s end. It is as if they had the nose and sagacity of a pair of
+bloodhounds. Ah, son of a cobbler, had you run off with the one I should
+have very soon caught you with the other; for if one walks the other is
+bound to follow. But, as you were honest, we part friends; and I trust
+God may bring you to fortune.” Then the traveller did up his bag of gold,
+nodded to the cobbler from the doorway, and was gone.
+
+Lubin laid down his work, and went off to the inn. “Did anything happen
+here last night?” he asked.
+
+“Nothing of much note,” answered the innkeeper. “Three travelling
+fiddlers were here, and afterwards a man came in barefoot, but with a red
+shoe sticking out of his pocket. I thought of turning the fellow away,
+till he let me see the colour of his gold. Presently the fiddlers started
+to play and the other man to drink. At first when they called on him to
+dance he excused himself for his feet’s sake; but presently, what with
+the music and the liquor, he got so lively in his head that he pulled on
+his one shoe and danced like three ordinary men put together.”
+
+“What time was that?” asked Lubin.
+
+“Getting on for midnight,” answered the innkeeper.
+
+“Ah!” said Lubin, and went home thinking much on the way.
+
+Towards evening he found that he had run out of leather, and must go into
+the town, ten miles off, to buy more. “Now my gold piece comes in handy,”
+thought he; so he locked up the house, put the key in his pocket, and set
+out.
+
+Though it was the season of long days it was growing dark when he came to
+a part of the road that led through the wood; but being so poor a man he
+had no fear, nor thought at all about the robbers who were said to be in
+those parts. But as he went, he saw all at once by the side of the road
+two red spikes sticking up out of a ditch, their bright colour making
+them plain to the eye. He came quite near and saw that they were two red
+shoes with pointed toes; and then he saw more clearly that along with
+them lay the traveller, his wallet empty and with a dagger stuck through
+his heart.
+
+The cobbler’s son was as sorry as he could be. “Alas, poor soul,” thought
+he, “what good are the shoes to you now? Now that thieves have killed you
+and taken away your gold, surely I do no harm if I give an honest man
+your shoes!” He stooped down, and was about taking them off when he saw
+the eyes of the dead man open. The eyes looked at him as if they would
+remind him of something; and at once, when he loosed hold of the shoes,
+they seemed satisfied. Then he remembered, and thought to himself, “The
+world has many marvels in it; I will wait till midnight and see.”
+
+For over three hours he kept watch by the dead man’s side. “Only last
+night,” he said to himself, “this poor fellow was dancing as merry a
+measure as ever I saw, for the half of it surely I saw; and now!” Then
+he judged that midnight must be come, so he bent over the shoes and
+whispered to them but one word.
+
+The dead man stood up in his shoes and began running. Lubin followed
+close, keeping an eye on him, for the shoes made no sound on the earth.
+They ran on for two hours, till they had come to the thickest part of the
+forest; then some way before them Lubin began to see a light shining. It
+came from a small square house in a court-yard, and round the court-yard
+lay a deep moat; only one narrow plank led over and up to the entrance.
+
+The red shoes, carrying the dead man, walked over, and Lubin followed
+them. When they were at the other side they turned, facing toward the
+plank that they had crossed, and Lubin seemed to read in the dead man’s
+eye what he was to do.
+
+Then he turned and lifted the plank away from over the moat, so that
+there was no longer any entrance or exit to the place. Through the window
+of the house he could see the three fiddlers quarrelling over the dead
+man’s gold.
+
+The red shoes went on, carrying their dead owner, till they got to the
+threshold, and there stopped. Then Lubin came and clicked up the latch,
+and pushed open the door, and in walked the dead man with the dagger
+sticking out of his heart.
+
+The three fiddlers, when they saw that sight, dropped their gold and
+leapt out of the window; and as they fled, shrieking, thinking to cross
+the moat by the plank-bridge that was no longer there, one after the
+other they fell into the water, and, clutching each other by the throat,
+were drowned.
+
+But the red shoes stayed where they were, and, tilting up his feet, let
+the traveller go gently upon the ground; and when Lubin held down the
+lantern to his face, on it lay a good smile, to tell him that the dead
+man thanked him for all he had done.
+
+So in the morning Lubin went and fetched a priest to pray for the repose
+of the traveller’s soul, and to give him good burial; and to him he gave
+all the dead man’s money, but for himself he took the red shoes with the
+pointed toes, and set out to make his fortune in the world.
+
+Walking along he found that however far he went he never grew tired. When
+he had gone on for more than a hundred miles, he came to the capital
+where the King lived with his Court.
+
+All the flags of the city were at half-mast, and all the people were in
+half mourning. Lubin asked at the first inn where he stopped what it all
+meant.
+
+“You must indeed be a stranger,” said his host, “not to know, for ’tis
+now nearly a year since this trouble began; and this very night more
+cause for mourning becomes due.”
+
+“Tell me of it, then,” said Lubin, “for I know nothing at all.”
+
+“At least,” returned the innkeeper, “you will know how, a little more
+than a year ago, the Queen, who was the most beautiful woman in the
+world, died, leaving the King with twelve daughters, who, after her,
+were reckoned the fairest women on earth, though the King says that all
+their beauty rolled into one would not equal that of his dead wife; and,
+indeed, poor man, there is no doubt that he loved her devotedly during
+her life, and mourns for her continually now she is dead.”
+
+“Only a small part of all this have I known,” said Lubin.
+
+“Well, but at least,” said the innkeeper, “you will have heard how the
+Princesses were famed for their hair; so beautiful it was, so golden, and
+so long! And now, at every full moon, one of them goes bald in a night;
+and bald her head stays as a stone, for never an inch of hair grows on
+it again; and with her hair all her beauty goes pale, so that she is but
+the shadow of her former self—a thin-blooded thing, as if a vampire had
+come and sucked out half her life. Yes; ten months this has happened, and
+ten of the Princesses have lost their looks and their hair as well; and
+now only the Princess Royal and the youngest of all remain untouched; and
+doubtless one of them is to lose her crop to-night.”
+
+“But how does it happen?” cried Lubin, “Is no one put to keep watch, to
+guard them from the thing being done?”
+
+“Ah! you talk, you talk!” said the innkeeper. “How? The King has offered
+half his kingdom to anyone who can tell him how the mischief is done; and
+the other half to the man who will put an end to it. To put it shortly,
+if you believe yourself a clever enough man, you may have the King for
+your father-in-law, with the pick of his daughters for your bride, and be
+his heir and lord of all when he dies!”
+
+“For such a reward,” said Lubin, “has no man made the attempt?”
+
+“Aye, one a month; every time there has been some man fool enough to
+think himself so clever; and he has been turned out of the palace next
+day with his ears cropped.”
+
+“I will risk having my ears cropped,” said Lubin; for his heart was sorry
+for the young Princesses, and the vanishing of their beauty. So he went
+up and knocked at the gates of the palace.
+
+They went and told the King that a new man had come willing and wanting
+to have his ears cropped on the morrow. “Well, well,” said the King,
+“let the poor fool in!” for indeed he had given up all hope. From the
+King Lubin heard the whole story over again. The old man sighed so, it
+took him whole hours to tell it.
+
+“I would be glad to be your son,” said Lubin, when the King had ended;
+“but I would like better to make you rid of your sorrow.”
+
+“That is kind of you,” said the King. “Perhaps I will only crop one of
+your ears to-morrow.”
+
+“When may one see the Princesses?” asked Lubin.
+
+“They will be down to supper, presently,” answered the King; “then you
+shall see them, what there is left of them.”
+
+Though it was reckoned that the next day Lubin would have to be drummed
+out of the palace with his ears cropped short, on this day he was to be
+treated like an honoured guest. When they went in to supper the King made
+him sit upon his right hand.
+
+The twelve Princesses came in, their heads bowed down with weeping; all
+were fair, but ten of them were thin and pale, and wore white wimples
+over their heads like nuns; only the Princess Royal, who was the eldest,
+and Princess Lyneth, who was the youngest, had gold hair down to their
+feet, and were both so shiningly beautiful that the poor cobbler was
+altogether dazzled by the sight of them.
+
+The King looked out of the window and said: “Heigho! There is the full
+moon beginning to rise.” Then they all said grace, and sat down.
+
+But when the viands were handed round, all the Princesses sat weeping
+into their plates, and seemed unable to eat anything. For the pale and
+thin ones said: “To-night another of our sisters will lose her golden
+hair and her good looks, and be like us!” Therefore they wept.
+
+And Lyneth said: “To-night, either my dear sister or myself will fall
+under the spell!” Therefore she wept more than the other ten. But the
+Princess Royal sat trembling, and crying:
+
+“To-night I know that the curse is to fall upon me, and me only!”
+Therefore she wept more than all.
+
+Lubin sat, and watched, and listened, with his head bent down over his
+golden plate. “Which of these two shall I try most to save?” he thought.
+“How shall I test them, so as to know? If I could only tell which of them
+was to lose her hair to-night, then I might do something.”
+
+He saw that the youngest sister cried so much that she could eat nothing;
+but the Princess Royal, between her bursts of grief, picked up a morsel
+now and again from her plate, and ate it as though courage or despair
+reminded her that she must yet strive to live.
+
+When the meat-courses were over, the King said to the Princesses: “I wish
+you would try to eat a little pudding! Here is a very promising youth,
+who is determined by all that is in him that harm shall happen to none of
+you to-night.”
+
+“To-morrow he will be sent away with his ears cut short!” said Princess
+Lyneth; and her tears, as she spoke, ran down over the edge of her plate
+on to the cloth.
+
+When supper was over the Princess Royal came up to Lubin, and said: “Do
+not be angry with my sister for what she said! It has only been too true
+of many who came before; to-night, unless you do better than them all, I
+shall lose my hair. It has been a wonder to me how I have been spared
+so long, seeing that I am the eldest, and, as some will have it, the
+fairest. Will you keep a good guard over me to-night, as though you knew
+for certain that I am to be the one this time to suffer?”
+
+“I will guard you as my own life,” said Lubin, “if you will but do as I
+ask you.”
+
+“Pledge yourself to me, then, in this cup!” said she, and lifted to his
+lips a bowl of red wine. Over the edge of it her eyes shone beautifully;
+he drank, gazing into their clear depth.
+
+“Where am I to be for the night,” he asked of the King, “so that I may
+watch over the two Princesses?”
+
+The King took him to a chamber with two further doors that opened out
+of it. “Here,” said the King, “you are to sleep, and in the inner rooms
+sleep the Princess Royal and the Princess Lyneth. There is no entrance
+or exit to them but through this; therefore, when you are here with your
+door bolted, one would suppose that you had them safe. Alas! ten other
+men have tried like you to ward off the harm, and have failed; and so
+to-day I have ten daughters with no looks left to them, and no hair upon
+their heads.”
+
+As they were speaking, the two Princesses, with their sisters, came up
+to bed. And the pale ones, wearing their white wimples, came and kissed
+the golden hair of the other two, crying over it, and saying, “To one of
+you we are saying good-bye; to-morrow one of you will be like us!” Then
+they went away to their sleeping-place, and the Princess Royal and Lyneth
+kissed each other, and parted weeping, each into her own chamber.
+
+“Watch well over us!” said Lyneth to Lubin, as she passed through. “Watch
+over me!” said the Princess Royal. And then the two doors were closed.
+
+Lubin said to the King, “Could I now see the two Princesses, without
+being seen by them, it would help me to know what to do.”
+
+“Come down to my cabinet,” said the King. “I have an invisible cap there,
+that I can lend you if you think you can do any good with it.” So they
+went; and the King reached down the cap from the wall and gave it to
+Lubin.
+
+“Now, good-night, your Majesty,” said Lubin; “I will do for you all I
+can.”
+
+The King answered, “Either you shall be my son-in-law to-morrow, or you
+shall have no ears. My wishes are with you that the former state may be
+yours.”
+
+Lubin went into his chamber and closed and bolted the door; then he put
+the bed up against it. “Now, at least,” he thought, “there are three of
+us, and no more!” He put on his invisible cap, and going softly to the
+Princess Royal’s door, opened it and peeped in.
+
+She stood up before her glass, combing out her long gold hair, and
+smiling proudly because of its beauty. She gathered it up by all its ends
+and kissed it; then, letting it fall, she went on combing as before.
+
+Lubin went out, closing the door again; then he took off his cap and
+knocked, and presently he heard the Princess Royal saying, “Come in!” She
+was lying down upon the bed, squeezing her eyes with her hands.
+
+“Princess,” he said, “I will watch over you like my own life, if you will
+do what I bid you. I am but a poor man, and the best that I can do is but
+poor; but I think, if you will, I can save your head from becoming as
+bare as a billiard ball.”
+
+The Princess asked him how.
+
+“You know,” said he, “that to-night something is to happen to one of you”
+(“To me?” said the Princess), “and all your hair will be stolen in such a
+way that nothing will ever make it grow again. See, here I have a pair of
+common scissors; let me but cut your hair close off all over your head,
+and then who can steal it? For a few months you will be a fright, but it
+can grow again.”
+
+“I think you are a silly fellow!” said the Princess. “Better for you to
+get to bed, and have your ears cropped quietly in the morning! After all,
+it may be my sister’s turn to lose her hair, not mine. I shall not make
+myself a fright for a year of my life in order to save you.”
+
+“If you think so poorly of my offer,” said Lubin, “I had better go to bed
+and sleep, and not trouble the Princess Lyneth at all with it.”
+
+“No, indeed!” said the Princess Royal. “Go to bed and sleep, poor fool!”
+And, in truth, Lubin was feeling so sleepy that he could hardly keep open
+his eyes.
+
+Then he left her, and, pulling the invisible cap once more over his head,
+crept softly into Princess Lyneth’s chamber.
+
+She was standing before her glass with all her beautiful hair flowing
+down from shoulders to feet; and tears were falling fast out of her eyes
+as she kept drawing her hair together in her hands, kissing and moaning
+over it.
+
+Then Lubin went out again, and, taking off his cap, knocked softly at the
+door.
+
+“Come in!” said the Princess; and when he went in she was still standing
+before the glass weeping and moaning for her beautiful hair, that might
+never see another day. On the bed was lying a white wimple, ready for her
+to put on when her head was become bald.
+
+“Princess,” said Lubin, very humbly, “will you help me to save your
+beautiful hair, by doing what I ask?”
+
+“What is it that you ask?” said she.
+
+“Only this,” he answered; “I am a poor man, and cannot do much for you,
+but only my best. To-night you or your sister must lose your hair; and we
+know that afterwards, if that happen, it can never grow again. Now, come,
+here I have a common pair of scissors; if I could cut your hair quite
+short, in a few months it will grow again, and there will be nothing
+to-night that the Fates can steal. Will you let me do this for you in
+true service?”
+
+The Princess looked at him, and looked at her glass. “Oh, my hair, my
+hair!” she moaned. Then she said, “What matters it? You mean to be good
+to me, and a month is the most that my fortune can last. If I do not lose
+it to-night, I lose it at the next full moon!” Then she shut her eyes and
+bade him take off all he wished. When he had finished, she picked up the
+wimple and covered her head with it; but Lubin took up the long coil of
+gold hair and wound it round his heart.
+
+He knelt down at her feet. “Princess,” he said, “be sure now that I can
+save you! Only I have one other request to make.”
+
+“What is that?” asked the Princess.
+
+He took off one of his red shoes with the pointed toes. “Will you, for a
+strange thing, put on this shoe and wear it all to-night in your sleep?
+And in the morning I will ask you for it again.”
+
+The Princess promised faithfully that she would do so. Even before he had
+left the room she had put foot in it, promising that only he should take
+it off again.
+
+Lubin’s eyes were shut down with sleep as he groped his way to bed; he
+lay down with the other red shoe upon his foot. “Watch for your fellow!”
+he said to it; and then his senses left him and he was fast asleep.
+
+In the middle of the night, while he was deep in slumber, the red shoe
+caught him by the foot and yanked him out of bed; he woke up to find
+himself standing in the middle of the room, and there before him stood
+the two doors of the inner chambers open; through that of the Princess
+Royal came a light. He heard the Princess Lyneth getting very softly out
+of her bed, and presently she stood in the doorway, with her hands out
+and her eyes fast shut; and the red shoe was on one foot, and the white
+wimple on her head. Little tears were running down from under her closed
+lids; and she sighed continually in her sleep. “Have pity on me!” she
+said.
+
+She crossed slowly from one door to the other; and Lubin, putting on
+his invisible cap, crept softly after her. The Princess Royal’s chamber
+was empty, but her glass was opened away from the wall like a door, and
+beyond lay a passage and steps. At the top of the steps was another door,
+and through it light came, and the sound of a soft voice singing.
+
+Princess Lyneth, knowing nothing in her sleep, passed along the passage
+and up the steps till she came to the further doorway. Looking over her
+shoulder Lubin saw the Princess Royal sitting before a loom. In it lay a
+great cloth of gold, like a bride’s mantle, into which she was weaving
+the last threads of her skein. Close to her side lay a pair of great
+shears that shone like blue fire; and while she sang they opened and
+snapped, keeping time to the music she made.
+
+Without ever turning her head the Princess Royal sat passing her fingers
+along the woof and crying:
+
+    “Sister, sister, bring me your hair,
+    Of our Mother’s beauty give me your share.
+    You must grow pale, while I must grow fair!”
+
+And while she was so singing, Lyneth drew nearer and nearer, with her
+eyes fast shut, and the white wimple over her head. “Have pity on me!”
+she said, speaking in her sleep.
+
+As soon as the Princess Royal heard that she laughed for joy, and
+catching up the great flaming shears, turned herself round to where
+Lyneth was standing. Then she opened the shears, and took hold of the
+wimple, and pulled it down.
+
+All in a moment she was choking with rage, for horrible was the sight
+that met her eye. “Ah! cobbler’s son,” cried she, “you shall die for
+this! To-morrow not only shall you have your two ears cropped, but you
+shall die: do not be afraid!”
+
+Lubin looked at her and smiled, knowing how little she thought that he
+heard her words. “Ah! Princess Royal,” he said to himself, “there is
+another who should now be afraid, but is not.”
+
+Then for very spite the Princess began slapping her sister’s face. “Ah!
+wicked little sister,” she cried, “you have cheated me this time! But go
+back and wait till your hair has grown, and then my gown of gold shall be
+finished, although this once you have been too sly!” She threw down the
+shears, and drove her sister back by stair and passage, and through the
+looking-glass door at the other end.
+
+Lubin following, stayed first to watch how by a secret spring the
+Princess Royal closed the mirror back into the wall; then he slipped on
+before, and taking off his cap, lay down on his bed pretending to be fast
+asleep. He heard Princess Lyneth return to her couch, and then came the
+Princess Royal and ground her teeth at him in the darkness.
+
+Presently she, too, returned to her bed and lay down; and an hour after
+Lubin got up very softly and went into her chamber. There she lay asleep,
+with her beautiful hair all spread out upon the pillow; but Lubin had
+Princess Lyneth’s hair wound round his heart. He touched the secret
+spring, so that the mirror opened to him, and he passed through toward
+the little chamber where stood the loom.
+
+There hung the cloth of gold, all but finished; beside it the shears
+opened and snapped, giving out a blue light. He took up the shears in
+his hand, and pulled down the gold web from the loom, and back he went,
+closing the mirror behind him.
+
+Then he came to the Princess Royal as she lay asleep; and first he laid
+the cloth of gold over her, and saw how at once she became ten times more
+fair than she was by rights, as fair almost as her dead mother, lacking
+one part only. But her beauty did not win him to have pity on her.
+
+“There can be thieves, it seems, in high places!” he said; and with that
+he opened the shears over her head and let them snap: then all her long
+hair came out by the roots, and she lay white and withered before his
+eyes, and as bald as a stone.
+
+He gathered up all her hair with one hand, and the cloth of gold with the
+other, and went quietly away. Then, hiding the shears in a safe place,
+first he burnt the Princess Royal’s hair, till it became only a little
+heap of frizzled cinders; and after that he went to the chamber of the
+ten Princesses, whose hair and whose sweet youth had been stolen from
+them. There they lay all in a row in ten beds, with pale, gentle faces,
+asleep under their white wimples.
+
+He went to the first, and, laying the cloth of hair over her, cried:
+
+    “Sister, sister, I bring you your hair,
+    Of your Mother’s beauty I give you your share.
+    One must grow pale, but you must grow fair!”
+
+And as he said the words one part of the cloth unwove itself from the
+rest, and ran in ripples up the coverlet, and on to the pillow where the
+Princess’s head lay. There it coiled itself under the wimple, a great
+mass of shining gold, and the face of the Princess flushed warm and
+lovely in her sleep.
+
+Lubin passed on to the next bed, and there uttered the same words;
+and again one part of the web came loose, and wound itself about the
+sleeper’s face, that grew warm and lovely at its touch. So he went from
+bed to bed, and when he came to the end there was no more of the web left.
+
+He went back into his own chamber, laughing in his heart for joy, and
+there he dropped himself between the sheets and fell into a sound slumber.
+
+He was wakened in the morning by the King knocking and trying to get into
+the room. Lubin pulled back the bed, and in came the King with a mournful
+countenance.
+
+“Which of them is it?” said he.
+
+“Go and ask them!” said Lubin.
+
+The King went over and knocked at the Princess Royal’s door; the knocking
+opened her eyes. Lubin heard her suddenly utter a yell. “Ah! now she has
+looked at herself in the glass,” thought he.
+
+“What is the matter?” called the King. “Come out and let me look at you!”
+But the Princess Royal would not come out. She ran quick to her mirror,
+and touched the secret spring. “At least,” she thought, “though fiends
+have robbed me of all my beauty, I can get it back by wearing the cloth
+woven from my sisters’ hair!” She skipped along the passage and up the
+steps to the little chamber where the loom was.
+
+The King, getting no answer, went across and knocked at Lyneth’s door;
+she came out, all fresh in her beauty, but wearing upon her head the
+wimple. “Ah!” said the King dolorously; and he snipped his fingers at
+Lubin.
+
+Lubin laughed out. “But look at her face!” he said. “Surely she is
+beautiful enough?”
+
+The Princess lifted up her wimple, and showed the King her hair all short
+beneath. “That was my doing,” said Lubin; “’twas the way of saving it.”
+
+“What a Dutchman’s remedy!” cried the King; and just then the Princess
+Royal’s door flew open.
+
+She came out tearing herself to pieces with rage; her face was pale and
+thin, and her head was as bare as a billiard ball. “Have that clown of
+a cobbler killed!” she cried in a passion. “That fool, that numbskull,
+that cheat! Have him beheaded, I say!”
+
+“No, no, I am only to have one of my ears cropped off!” said Lubin,
+looking hard at her all the time.
+
+“I am not at all sure,” said the King. “You have done foolishly and
+badly, for not only have you let the disease go on, but your very remedy
+is as bad. Two heads of hair gone in one night! You had better have kept
+away. If the Princesses wish it, certainly I will have you put to death.”
+
+“Will you not see the other Princesses too?” asked Lubin. “Let them
+decide between them whether I am to live or die!”
+
+The King was just going to call for them, when suddenly the ten
+Princesses opened the door of their chamber, and stood before him shining
+like stars, with all their golden hair running down to their feet.
+
+“Now put me to death!” said Lubin; and all the time he kept his eye upon
+the Princess Royal, who turned flame-coloured with rage.
+
+“No, indeed!” cried the King. “Now you must be more than pardoned! You
+see, my dears,” he said to Lyneth and the Princess Royal, “though you
+have suffered, your sisters have recovered all that they lost. They are
+ten to two; and I can’t go back on arithmetic; I am bound to do even more
+than pardon him for this.”
+
+“Indeed and indeed yes!” replied the Princess Lyneth. “He has done ten
+times more than we thought of asking him!” And she went from one to
+another of her recovered sisters, kissing their beautiful long hair for
+pure gladness of heart. But when she came to the Princess Royal, she
+kissed her many times, and stooped down her face upon her shoulder, and
+cried over her.
+
+“Tell me now,” said the King to Lubin, “for you are a very wonderful
+fellow, how did it all happen?”
+
+Lubin looked at the Princess Royal; after all he could not betray a
+lady’s secret. “I cannot tell you,” he said; “if I did, there would be a
+death in the family.”
+
+“Well,” said the King, “however you may have done it, I own that you
+have earned your reward. You have only to choose now with which of my
+daughters you will become my son-in-law. From this day you shall be known
+as my heir.” He ranged all the Princesses in line, according to their
+ages. “Now choose,” said the King, “and choose well!”
+
+Lubin went up to the Princess Royal. “I won’t have you!” he said, looking
+very hard at her; and the Princess Royal dropped her eyes. Then he went
+on to the next. “Sweet lady,” he said, “I dare not ask one with such
+beautiful hair as yours to marry me, who am a poor cobbler’s son.” But
+all the while he had the Princess Lyneth’s hair bound round his heart.
+
+He went on from one to another, and of each he kissed the hand, saying
+that she was too fair to marry him.
+
+He came to Lyneth, and knelt down at her feet. “Lyneth,” he said, “will
+you give the poor cobbler back his shoe?”
+
+Lyneth, looking in his eyes, saw all that he meant. “And myself in it,”
+she said, “for you love me dearly!” She put her arms round his neck, and
+whispered, “You marry me because I am a fright, and have no hair!”
+
+But Lubin said, “I have your hair all wound round my heart, making it
+warm!”
+
+So they were married, and lived together more happily than cobbler and
+princess ever lived in the world before. And the cobbler dropped mending
+shoes: only his wife’s shoes he always mended. Very soon Lyneth’s hair
+grew again, more shining and beautiful than before; but the Princess
+Royal remained pale, and thin, and was bald to the day of her death.
+
+
+
+
+THE MOON FLOWER
+
+  _TO_
+  EVA AND KATIE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE MOON-FLOWER
+
+Princess Berenice sat by a window of her father’s palace, looking out of
+the Moon. In her hand she held a great white pearl, and smiled, for it
+was her mother’s birthday gift. The chamber in which she sat was of pure
+silver, and in the floor was a small window by which she could see out of
+the Moon and right down on to the Earth, where the moonbeams were going.
+There it lay like a great green emerald; and wherever the clouds parted
+to let the moonbeams go through, she could see the tops of the trees, and
+broad fields with streams running by.
+
+“Yonder is the land of the coloured stones,” she said to herself, “that
+the merchants go down the moonbeams and bring home and sell.” And as she
+bent lower and lower and gazed with curious eyes, the great pearl rolled
+from her hand and fell out of the Moon, and went slipping and sliding
+down a moonbeam, never stopping till it got to the Earth.
+
+“My mother’s pearl!” cried the Princess, “the most beautiful of all her
+pearls that she gave me. I must run down and bring it back; for if I wait
+it will be lost. And as to-night is the full-moon down there upon Earth,
+I can return before anyone finds out that I am gone.”
+
+The Earth was sparkling a brighter green under the approach of night.
+“Oh, land of the coloured stones!” cried the Princess; and, slipping
+through the window, she stepped out of the Moon, and went running down
+the same moonbeam by which the pearl had fallen.
+
+Night came; and the Earth and the Moon lay looking at each other in the
+midst of heaven, like an emerald and a pearl; but through the palace,
+and within, over all its gardens and terraces there began to be callings
+on the Princess Berenice; and presently there were heart-searchings
+and fear, for they found the empty room with its open window: and the
+Princess Berenice was not there.
+
+Now, not long before this, upon our own Earth there had lived and died
+a King who had four sons, but only three kingdoms. So when he came to
+die he gave to each of his three eldest sons a kingdom apiece; but to
+the youngest, having nothing else left to give, he gave only a pair of
+travelling shoes, and said: “Wear these, and some day they will take you
+to fortune!”
+
+So, when the King was dead, the young Prince wore the shoes night and
+day, hoping that some time or another they would take him to fortune. His
+brothers laughed at him, and said: “Our father was wise to play those old
+shoes off upon you! If it had been either of us we would have gone and
+bought ourselves an army and fought for a just share in the inheritance.
+But you seem pleased, so we ought to be.”
+
+Now one day the Prince went out hunting in the forest, and there, having
+become separated from all his friends, he thoroughly lost his way.
+Wherever he turned the wood seemed to grow denser, the thickets higher,
+and the solitude more than he ever remembered before. Night came on,
+and, there being nothing else that he could do, he lay down and wrapped
+himself in his cloak and slept.
+
+When he awoke it was day, but the woods were as still as death; no bird
+sang, and not a cricket chirped among the grass. As he sat up he noticed
+that the shoe was gone from his left foot, nor could he see it anywhere
+near. “Tis the half of my inheritance gone!” he said to himself, and got
+up to search about him. But still no shoe could he find. At last he gave
+up the search as useless, and set off walking without it. Then as it
+seemed to him so ridiculous to go limping along with only one shoe on, he
+took off the remaining one, and threw it away, saying: “Go, stupid, and
+find your fellow!”
+
+To the Prince’s great astonishment, it set off at a rapid pace through
+the wood, all of its own accord. The Prince, barefoot except for his
+stockings, began to run after it.
+
+Presently he found that he was losing his breath. “Hie, hie!” he called
+out, “not quite so fast, little leather-skins!” But the shoe paid him no
+heed and went on as before. It skipped through the grass and brushwood,
+as if a young girl’s foot were dancing inside it; and whenever it came to
+a fallen tree, or a boulder of rock, it was up and over with a jump like
+a grasshopper.
+
+Before long the Prince’s stockings were in nothing but holes and tatters;
+as he ran they fluttered from his legs like ribbons. He had lost his hat,
+and his cloak was torn into patterns, and he felt from head to foot like
+a house all doors and windows. He was almost on his last gasp when he saw
+that the shoe was making straight for a strange little house of green
+bronze, shut in by a high wall, and showing no windows; and in the middle
+of the wall was a bronze door shut fast. As he came near he found that
+outside, on the doorstep, stood his other shoe as if waiting to be let
+in. “So it was worth running for!” thought he; and then, putting on both
+shoes again, he began knocking at the door.
+
+As he knocked the door opened. It opened in such a curious way, flat down
+like a swing-bridge or like the lid of a box. For some time he was half
+afraid to walk in on the top of it. Presently, however, he summoned up
+his courage and stepped across it.
+
+The door closed behind him like a trap, and he found himself in a
+beautiful house; all its walls were hung with gold and precious stones,
+but everywhere was the emptiness and the silence of death.
+
+He went from room to room seeking for any that lived there, but could see
+no one. In one place he found thrown down a fan of white feathers and
+pearl; and in another flowers, fresh plucked, lying close by a cushion
+dinted and hollowed, as though the weight of a head or arm had rested
+there. But beyond these there was no sign of a living thing to be found.
+
+Through the windows he saw deep bowery gardens hemmed in by high walls,
+within which grew flowers of the loveliest kinds. All the paths were of
+smooth grass, and everywhere were the traces of gentle handiwork; but
+still not a soul was to be seen.
+
+It seemed to the Prince now and then that there was something in the
+garden which moved, distinct from the flowers, and shifting with a will
+of its own. Though the sun shone full down, casting clear shadows across
+the lawns, this that he saw was altogether misty and faint. Now it
+seemed like a feather blown to and fro in the wind, and now like broken
+gossamer threads, or like filmy edges of clouds melting away in the heat.
+Where it went the flowers moved as though to make way for it, swaying
+apart and falling together again as it passed.
+
+The Prince watched and watched. He tired his eyes with watching, yet he
+could see no more; and no way could he find to the garden, for all the
+doors leading to it were locked fast and barred.
+
+There was another strange thing he noticed which seemed to him to have
+no meaning. All over the garden, between the trees and the sky, was
+stretched a silver net, so fine that it showed only as a faint film
+against the blue; but a net for all that. Here and there, the light of
+the sun catching it, hung sparkling in its silver meshes. It was like the
+net that a gardener throws over strawberry beds or currant bushes to keep
+off the birds from the fruit. So was it with this net; through it no bird
+could enter the garden, and no bird that was in the garden could leave it.
+
+All day the Prince had these two things before his eyes to wonder about,
+till the sun went down and it began to get dusk.
+
+At the moment when the sun sank below the earth there was a sound of
+opening doors all over the house. The Prince ran and found one of the
+doors leading into the garden wide open, and through it he could see the
+stir of leaves, and the deep colours of the flowers growing deeper in the
+dusk; only the evening primroses were lighting their soft lamps.
+
+From a distant part of the garden came the sound of falling water, and a
+voice singing. As he approached he saw something shining against the dark
+leaves higher than the heads of the flowers; and before he well knew what
+he saw, he found before his eyes the most lovely woman that the mind of
+man could believe in.
+
+In her hand hung a watering-can, with the water falling from it in sprays
+on to the flower beds beneath. Her head was bent far down, yet how she
+looked slender and tall! She was very pale, yet a soft light seemed to
+grow from her, the light of a new moon upon a twilight sky. And now the
+Prince heard clearly the sweet voice, and the words that she was singing:
+
+    “Listen, listen, listen,
+      O heart of the sea!
+    I am the Pearl of pearls,
+    I am the Mother of pearls,
+      And the Mother of thee.
+    Glisten, glisten, glisten,
+      O bed of the sea!
+    Lost is the Pearl of pearls,
+    And all the divers for pearls
+      Are drowning for me.”
+
+He stood enchanted to hear her; but the words of the song ended suddenly
+in a deep sigh. The singer lifted her head; her eyes moved like grey
+moths in the dusk, amid the whiteness of her face. At sight of him they
+grew still and large, widening with a quiet wonder. Then the beautiful
+face broke into smiles, and the Princess stretched out her hands to him
+and laughed.
+
+“Have you come,” she said, “to set me free?”
+
+“To set you free?” asked the Prince.
+
+“I am a prisoner,” she told him.
+
+“Alas, then!” answered the Prince, “I am a prisoner also, and can free no
+one; but were I now free to go wherever I would, I should be a prisoner
+still, for I have seen the face of the loveliest heart on earth!”
+
+“O,” she sighed, “and can you not set me free?”
+
+“Tell me,” he said, “what makes you a prisoner here?”
+
+She pointed to the net over their heads, to the walls that stood on all
+sides of them, and to the ground beneath their feet. “That,” she said,
+“and that, and this.”
+
+“Who are you?” he asked, “and where do you come from? and whose power is
+it that now holds you captive?”
+
+She led him on to a terrace, from which they could see out towards the
+west; and there lay the new Moon, low down in the sky. “Yonder,” she
+said, pointing to it, “is my home!” She wept. “Shall I ever return to it?”
+
+The Prince, gazing at her in wonder, cried, “Are you one of a Fairy race?”
+
+“No, oh, no!” she sighed, “I am but mortal like yourself; only my home
+is there, while yours is here. We, who dwell in the Moon, are as you
+are, but the sun has greater power over us; the light of it falling on
+us makes us pale and unsubstantial, so that we weigh not so much as a
+gossamer and become transparent as thin fleeces of cloud. Then we can go
+where you cannot go, treading the light as it flies; but at sunset we
+regain our strength, and our bodies come to us again; and we are as you
+see me now—no different from yourselves, the inhabitants of the Earth.”
+
+“Tell me,” said the Prince, “of yourself, and the dwellers in the Moon!
+Is it not cold there, and barren?”
+
+She answered smiling, for the memory of her home was sweet to her,
+“Outside, the Moon is cold and barren; but within it is very warm and
+rich and fertile; more beautiful than any place I have seen on Earth. It
+is there we live; and we have flocks, and herds, and woods, and rivers,
+and harbours, and seas. Also we have great cities built inside the Moon’s
+crust, for the Moon is a great hollow shell, and we walk upon its inner
+surface and are warm. The sunlight comes to us through craters and clefts
+in the ground; and the beams of it are like solid pillars of gold that
+quiver and sway as they shoot upwards into the opal twilight of our
+world; and the shine and the warmth of it come to us, and colour the air
+above our heads; but we are safe from its full light falling on us, for
+the ground is between us and it. Only when we pass through to the outer
+side do we become pale and faint, a mere whisper of our former selves.
+And then we are so light that if we step upon a moonbeam it will bear our
+weight; and the moonbeam carries us swiftly as its own light travels,
+till it reaches the Earth: so we come. But to return there is another
+way.”
+
+And when the Prince asked her, she told him of the other way back into
+the Moon.
+
+“When we wish to return,” she went on “(for the falling light of a
+moonbeam cannot carry us back), we must go where there is a pool of still
+water, and wait for the reflection of the Moon to fall on it; and when
+the Moon is full, and throws its image into the water, then we dive down,
+and with our lips touch the reflection of its face, crying, ‘Open, open
+to me, for I am a Moon-child!’ And the Moon will open her face like a
+door of pearl, and let us pass in; and when she draws her reflection out
+of the pool, we find ourselves once again among our own people and in our
+own land. Many of us have so come and so returned,” she sighed deeply,
+“but I fear that I shall never again return.”
+
+Then the Prince asked her further whose power it was that held her
+captive; and she told him how she had dropped the pearl that her mother
+had given her, and had come down seeking it. Then she said, “In the
+Moon we have many jewels, for we have opals and onyxes, and pearls and
+moonstones, but we have no rubies, or emeralds, or sapphires, or stones
+of a single colour, such as you have. Therefore, we have a passion for
+these things, and our merchants come down and bring them back to us at a
+great price.
+
+“Now it chanced that in my search I came upon a gnome who had dealings
+with our merchants and had many jewels to sell, and he, seeming to be
+kind, helped me until my pearl was found. Then he took me to see his
+own treasures, and, alas, while my eyes were feasting on the colours of
+the stones he showed to me, my poor beauty inflamed the avarice of his
+evil heart, and the desire to have me for his wife became great. So when
+I asked him the price of his jewels, he vowed that the only price at
+which he would let them go was that of my own hand in marriage. Alas, I
+am young and innocent, and without subtlety, nor did I know how great
+was his power and wickedness. As I laughed at his request his face
+grew dark with rage, and I saw that I had incurred the undying enmity
+of his cruel heart. And now for a whole year he has held me in his
+enchantment, striving to break me to his will by the length and weariness
+of my captivity; and lest search or any help should come for me from my
+father’s people, he has covered me in with a net, and surrounded me with
+walls; and here there is no pool into which the full Moon may fall, and
+at the mere touch of my lips upon its face, open and draw me free from
+my enchantment, and back into the heart of my own land. Only yonder, in
+the corner of the garden is a deep well, where the Moon never shines; so
+there is no way here left for me by which I may get free.”
+
+“Does not the gnome ever come to see you in your captivity?” asked the
+Prince. “If so, I may by some means be able to entrap him, and force him
+to let you go.”
+
+“Twice in the year he has visited me,” answered the Princess. “He comes
+up out of the ground in the form of a Red Mole; but he looks at me
+wickedly and cunningly with the eyes of a man, seeming to say, ‘Will you
+have me yet?’ And when I shake my head he burrows under again, and is
+gone till another six months shall be past.”
+
+The Prince thought for a while and said, “I do not know whether I have
+the power or the wit to make you free; if love only were needed for the
+work, to-morrow would see you as free as a bird.”
+
+The Princess, between smiles and sighs, said, “I have been most lonely
+here; already you make my imprisonment seem less.” Then she led him
+within doors, from room to room, showing him the splendours of her
+prison. Wherever they went, out of the floor before them rose burning
+jewels that hung hovering over their heads to light them as they passed;
+and when she struck her hands together, up from the ground rose a table
+covered with fruit and dainties of all sorts; and when she and the Prince
+had eaten, she clapped her hands again, and they disappeared by the same
+way that they had come.
+
+The Prince was struck with admiration at the delicacy of these marvels.
+“When I think of the Red Mole, they sicken me!” said the Moon-Princess.
+The good youth used all his arts to cheer her, promising to devote
+himself, and if need be his life, to the task of setting her free. And
+now and then she laughed and was almost merry again, forgetting the walls
+that still held her spell-bound from her own people and her own land.
+
+She showed the Prince a chamber where he might sleep; and so soft and
+warm was the couch after his last hard night on the ground, that it was
+full day before he awoke. The Princess Berenice appeared before him misty
+and faint, for the sunlight threw a veil upon her beauty; but still as he
+looked at her he did not love her less, and it still seemed to him that
+hers was the face of the loveliest heart on earth.
+
+All day he watched her drifting about the garden, seeming to feed herself
+on the scent of the flowers. In the evening, when the sun set, her body
+grew strong and her face shone out to him like the new Moon upon a
+twilight sky.
+
+Then he drew water for her from the well, and watched her as she watered
+the flowers which were her only delight. Presently he said, “There is
+much water in the well, for the rope goes down into it many fathoms; and
+yet I find no bottom.”
+
+“Yes,” answered the Princess, “I doubt not that the well is deep.”
+
+“Before many days are over,” said the Prince, “the well shall become a
+pool.”
+
+The Princess wondered to hear him. “Is there,” he went on, “no such thing
+as a spade for me to dig with?” Then she led him to a shed, where lay all
+the needed implements for gardening. So his eyes brightened, while he
+cried, “O, beautiful Princess Berenice, as I love you, before many weeks
+are over you shall be free!”
+
+The next morning he arose very early, and in the centre of the garden,
+where the ground hollowed somewhat, he marked out a space and set to work
+to dig.
+
+All day the Princess went to and fro, faint and pale as a mist, watching
+him at his work. At dusk her beauty shone full upon him, and she said,
+“What is this that you are doing?” He answered, “What I am making shall
+presently become a pool; then when the pool is full, and the full Moon
+comes and shines on it, you shall go down into the water, and shall
+kiss the face of its reflection with your lips, and be free from your
+enchantment.”
+
+Princess Berenice looked long at him, and her eyes clung to his like
+soft moths in the gloom. “But you?” she said, “You are no Moon-child, and
+this will never set you free.”
+
+“Ever since I saw you,” said the Prince, “I have not thought of freedom;
+my dearest wish is but to set you free.”
+
+The Princess gave him her hand. “And mine,” she said, “my dearest wish
+henceforth is to set you free also. Yet I know but one way, and I cannot
+name it.” She smiled tenderly on him, and bowed her face into the shadow
+of her hair.
+
+The Prince caught her in his arms, “One way is my way!” he cried. “Your
+way,” she said, “is my way.” Then, when he had finished kissing her, she
+said, “Look, on my finger is a ring; this ring is for him to whom I give
+myself in marriage. Surely, it opens to him the heart of my own people,
+and he becomes one of us, a child of the Moon.” She showed him an opal
+ring, full of fires. “If your way is my way,” she said, “draw this off my
+finger, and put it upon your own, and take me to be your wife!”
+
+So the Prince drew off the ring from her finger, and set it upon his own;
+and as he did so he felt indeed the heart of the Moon-people become his
+own, and the love of the Moon strike root in him. Yet did the love of the
+Earth remain his as well, making it seem as if all the love in his heart
+had but doubled itself.
+
+So he and the most beautiful Berenice were married there by the light of
+the new Moon, and all thought of sorrow or danger from the encirclement
+that bound them was lost in their great joy.
+
+During the whole of the next day the Prince went on with his digging,
+making a broad shallow in the ground. “Before the full Moon comes,” he
+said, “I will make it deep.” And he worked on, refusing to take any rest.
+
+The Princess loved him more and more as she watched him; and his love for
+her daily increased, for every day, while the Moon grew full, her beauty
+shone in greater perfection and splendour. “Here,” she said to him, “the
+coming of the full Moon is like the coming of Spring to me: I feel it in
+my blood. After the full Moon my beauty will wane and grow paler. But
+in my own land I do not feel these changes, for there it is always the
+full Moon.” The Prince answered her, “To me your beauty, though it grows
+more, will not ever grow less.”
+
+At last, on the day before that of the full Moon, the pit which he had
+dug was broad and deep; then he began to fill it with water from the
+well. “To-morrow,” he said to his wife, when the pool was nearly full, as
+she came and stood by his side at sunset in the full blaze of her beauty,
+“to-morrow we shall be free; and you will carry me away with you into
+your own land.”
+
+“I do not know,” said the Princess, “I begin to be afraid!” and she
+sighed heavily. “Any day the Red Mole may come: one day is not too soon
+for him to be here.”
+
+“But why need you fear him now?” asked the Prince. “Since you are married
+to me, you cannot be married to him.”
+
+“As to that,” said she, “I fear that to have outwitted him will but make
+his malice all the greater against us!” Then she walked softly among the
+moonbeams, bathing her hands in them, and letting them fall upon the
+loveliness of her face; and as she stood in their light, tears rained
+down out of her eyes.
+
+In the morning it seemed as if her happiness had returned. The Prince,
+as he toiled under the blazing sun, carrying water from the well to the
+pool, felt her moving by his side, and heard her light shadowy laughter
+when, just before sunset, the water flowed level to the pool’s brink.
+And when dusk rose out of the grass, there she stood glowing with the
+full Moon of her beauty, and leaning in all the light of her loveliness
+towards him.
+
+The happy night drew round them; out of the East came the glow of the
+full Moon as it rose; soon, soon it would cross the tops of the trees
+and rest its face upon the quiet waters of the pool. They clung in each
+other’s arms, entranced. “My beautiful,” said the Prince, “shall we not
+take to your mother some of those jewels she loves—the green, and the
+red, and the blue, and the pearl which was hers, the quest of which has
+cost you so much?” He ran into one of the jewelled chambers where lay
+the pearl, and caught from the walls the largest stones he could find.
+Quickly he went and returned, for the Moon was now fast cresting the
+avenues of the garden. He came bearing the jewels in his hands.
+
+Princess Berenice stood no longer by the brink of the pool, though
+therein lay the image of the Moon’s face, a circle of pale gold upon
+the water. “Berenice,” called the Prince, and ran through the garden,
+searching for her. “Berenice!” he cried by the well; but she was not
+there. “Berenice!” His voice grew trembling and weak, and quick fear took
+hold of him. “O, my beautiful, my beloved, where are you?”
+
+Only the silence stood up to answer him. Under his feet ran a Red Mole.
+
+It scampered across the grass, and disappeared through a burrow in the
+ground. Then the Prince knew that the worst had surely come, and that his
+Princess had been taken away from him. Where she was he could not know;
+within her former prison she was nowhere to be seen.
+
+All night the Prince lay weeping by the brink of the pool, where she had
+last stood before his sight; the print of her dear feet still lay on the
+lawn where she had stayed waiting with him so long. “O, miserable wretch
+that I am!” he cried, kissing the trodden grass. “Now never again may I
+hope to behold you, or hear your dear voice!”
+
+All the day following he wandered like a ghost from place to place,
+filling the empty garden with memories of her presence, and sighing over
+and over again the music of her name. All the flowers glowed round him in
+their accustomed beauty; new buds came into life, and full blooms broke
+and fell; not a thing seemed to sorrow for her loss except himself. As
+for the flowers, he paid them little heed.
+
+In his sleep that night a dream came to him, a dream as of something
+that whispered and laughed in his ear. Over and over again it seemed to
+be saying, “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon came, and the Princess
+jumped down into the water!” Then his heart knocked so loud for joy that
+he started awake, and saw the Red Mole scuffling away to its burrow in
+the ground.
+
+Then he feared that the dream was but a thing devised to cheat his fancy,
+and get rid of him by making him go away and search for his Princess in
+the land of the Moon, by the way that she had told him. But he thought
+to himself, “If the Red Mole wants so much to get me away, it means that
+my beloved is somewhere near at hand. Is she in the well?” he began
+wondering; and as soon as it was light he went to where lay the well in
+its corner under the shadow of the wall. But though he searched long and
+diligently, there was no trace of her that he could find.
+
+Yet every time he came near to the well sorrow seemed to take hold of
+him, and, mixed with it, a kind of joy, as though indeed the heart of his
+beloved beat in this place. Near to the well stood a tall flower with
+bowed head. It seemed to him the only one in the whole garden that had
+any share in his sorrow: he wondered if the flower had grown up to mark
+the sad place of her burial.
+
+“O, my beloved Berenice, art thou near me now?” he murmured,
+heart-broken, one day as he passed by: then it seemed to him that all
+at once the flower stirred. He turned to look at it; it was like a
+sunflower, but white even to its centre, and its head kept drooping as if
+for pure grief. “Berenice, Berenice!” he wept, passing it.
+
+At dusk he returned again; and now the flower’s head was lifted up, and
+shone with a strange lustre. The Prince, as he went by on his way to the
+well, saw the flower turn its head, bending its face ever towards where
+he was. Then grief and joy stirred in his heart. “The flower knows where
+she is!” he said.
+
+So he bent, whispering, “Where, then, is Berenice?” and the flower lifted
+its head, and hung quite still, looking at him.
+
+Then the Prince whispered again, “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon
+came, and the Princess jumped down into the water?”
+
+But the flower swayed its head from side to side, and the Prince found
+that it had answered “No.”
+
+Then he had it in his mind to ask of it further things; but, as he was
+about to speak, he beheld its face all brimming over with tears, that
+suddenly broke and fell down in a shower over its leaves.
+
+At that his heart leaped, and his voice choked as he cried, “Art _thou_
+my beloved, my Berenice?” And all at once the flower swayed down, and
+leaned, and fell weeping against his breast.
+
+So at last he knew! And joy and grief struggled together in him for
+mastery.
+
+All that night he knelt with the flower’s head upon his heart, stroking
+its soft leaves, and letting it rest between his hands; till, towards
+dawn, it seemed to him that peace was upon it and sleep.
+
+All through the day it hung faint upon its stem; but when evening came it
+lifted its head and shone in moon-like beauty; and so deep for it was the
+Prince’s love and compassion that he could hardly bear to be absent from
+its side one moment of the day or night.
+
+And, when he was very weary, he lay down under its shadow to sleep; and
+the Moon-flower bent down and rested its head upon his face.
+
+All night long in dreams Berenice came back to him. He seemed to hear how
+the Red Mole had come, and changed her to a rooted shape, lest the full
+Moon in the water should carry her away from him back into her own land.
+Yet it was only a dream, and the Prince could learn nothing there of the
+way by which he might set her free.
+
+A month went by, and he said to his Flower, “To-night is the night of
+the full Moon: now, if I drew you from the ground, and carried you down,
+and called for the Moon’s face to open to us, would you not be free from
+the enchantment, when you were come again to your own people?” But
+the Moon-flower shook its head, as if to bid him still wait and watch
+patiently.
+
+Now, as the Prince came and went day by day, he began to notice that
+the Moon-flower had its roots in a small green mound, no bigger than a
+mole-hill; and he thought to himself, “surely that mound was not there at
+first: the Red Mole must be down below at work!” So he watched it from
+day to day; and at last he knew for certain that, as time went on, the
+mound grew larger.
+
+Month by month the mound upon which the Moon-flower had root increased in
+size; yet the Flower thrived, and its beauty shone brighter as each full
+Moon approached, so that at last the Prince’s fear lest the Red Mole were
+working mischief against its life, passed away.
+
+Once, on the night of a full Moon, as the Prince lay with his head upon
+Earth, and the Moon-flower bowed over his face, he heard under the mound
+a peal of silvery laughter; and at the sound of it the Moon-flower
+started, and stood erect, and a stir of delight seemed to take hold of
+its leaves. Again the laughter came, and the soft earth moved at the
+sound of it.
+
+The Prince started up, and ran and fetched a spade, and struck it down
+under the loose soil of the mound. When he lifted up the earth, out
+sprang a tiny child like a lobe of quicksilver, laughing merrily with
+its first leap into the light. But even then its laughter changed into a
+cry; for out after it darted the Red Mole, with fury in its whiskers, and
+wrath flashing out of its eyes.
+
+The quicksilver child sprang away, and went shrilling over the grass
+toward the margin of the pool. There lay the full Moon’s image upon the
+clear stillness of the water; and the child leapt down the bank, and
+laughed as it sprang safely away. Then there followed a tiny splash; and
+the Prince, amid the rings upon the water’s surface, saw, like a door of
+pearl, the Moon’s face open and close again. And the Red Mole went down
+into the earth gnashing its teeth for rage.
+
+The Prince ran back to the Moon-flower, and found it bent forwards
+and trembling with fear. Then he drew its head towards his heart, and
+whispered “The Red Mole came, and the full Moon came, and the silver
+child jumped down into the water!” And at that the Flower lifted its
+head and began clapping its leaves for joy.
+
+A month went by, and the green mound had disappeared from beneath the
+Moon-flower’s roots; and still every night the Prince lay down under the
+shadow of its leaves; and the Flower bent over him, and laid its head
+against his face.
+
+As he lay so, one night, and watched the full Moon travelling high
+overhead, he saw a shadow begin to cross over it; and he knew that it was
+the eclipse, which is the shadow of the Earth passing over the face of
+the Moon; then he rose softly, leaving the Moon-flower asleep, and went
+and stood by the brink of the pool.
+
+Up in the Moon the silver child felt the shadow of the Earth fall upon
+the face of the Moon; and he came and touched the Earth’s shadow with
+his lips, crying, “Open, open to me, for I am an Earth-child!” Then the
+Earth’s shadow that was upon the Moon opened, and the silver child sprang
+through.
+
+The Prince, watching the veiled image of the Moon’s face in the water,
+saw the Earth’s shadow open like a door, so that for an instant the
+brightness of the Moon shone through, and out sprang the quicksilver
+child, up to the surface of the pool.
+
+He leapt laughing up the bank, and went running over the grass to where
+the Moon-flower was standing. He reached up his arms, and caught the
+Flower by the head:
+
+“O mother, mother, mother!” he cried as he kissed it.
+
+And at the touch of his lips the Moon-flower opened and changed, growing
+wondrously tall and fair; and the flower turned into a face, and the
+leaves disappeared, till it was the beautiful Princess Berenice herself,
+who stooped down and took the quicksilver child up into her arms.
+
+She cried, fondling him, “Did they give you your name?”
+
+And the child laughed. “They call me Gammelyn,” he said.
+
+The Prince caught them both together in his arms. “Come, come!” he
+shouted and laughed, “for yonder is the full Moon waiting for us!” And,
+lifting them up, he ran with them to the borders of the pool.
+
+And the Red Mole came, and the full Moon came; and the Prince, and the
+Princess, and the silver child jumped down into the water.
+
+Then the Prince laid his lips against the reflection of the Earth’s
+shadow, crying, “Open, open to me, for I am a child of the Earth!” And
+the shadow opened like a door to let them pass through. Then they pressed
+their lips against the reflection of the Moon’s face crying, “Open, open
+to us, for we are Moon-children!” And the Moon opened her face like a
+door of pearl, so that they sprang through together, and were safe.
+
+And when the Moon drew its reflection out of the pool, they found
+themselves in the land of the Moon, in the silver chamber with the round
+window, in the palace of Princess Berenice’s father.
+
+Looking out through the window, down at the end of a long moonbeam they
+saw the Red Mole gnashing his whiskers for rage. Then the Prince took off
+his shoes, and threw them with all his might down the moonbeam at the
+Mole.
+
+As the shoes fell, they went faster, and faster, and faster, till they
+came to earth; and they struck the Mole so hard upon the head that he
+died.
+
+Now as for Gammelyn and the shoes we may hear of them again elsewhere;
+but as for the Prince and his beautiful Princess Berenice, the happiness
+in which they lived for the rest of their days is too great even to be
+told of.
+
+
+
+
+HAPPY RETURNS
+
+  _TO_
+  JEANNIE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HAPPY RETURNS
+
+By the side of a great river, whose stream formed the boundary to two
+countries, lived an old ferryman and his wife. All the day, while she
+minded the house, he sat in his boat by the ferry, waiting to carry
+travellers across; or, when no travellers came, and he had his boat free,
+he would cast drag-nets along the bed of the river for fish. But for the
+food which he was able thus to procure at times, he and his wife might
+well have starved, for travellers were often few and far between, and
+often they grudged him the few pence he asked for ferrying them; and now
+he had grown so old and feeble that when the river was in flood he could
+scarcely ferry the boat across; and continually he feared lest a younger
+and stronger man should come and take his place, and the bread from his
+mouth.
+
+But he had trust in Providence. “Will not God,” he said, “who has
+given us no happiness in this life, save in each other’s help and
+companionship, allow us to end our days in peace?”
+
+And his wife answered, “Yes, surely, if we trust Him enough He will.”
+
+One morning, it being the first day of the year, the ferryman going down
+to his boat, found that during the night it had been loosed from its
+moorings and taken across the river, where it now lay fastened to the
+further bank.
+
+“Wife,” said he, “I can remember this same thing happening a year ago,
+and the year before also. Who is this traveller who comes once a year,
+like a thief in the night, and crosses without asking me to ferry him
+over?”
+
+“Perhaps it is the good folk,” said his wife. “Go over and see if they
+have left no coin behind them in the boat.”
+
+The old man got on to a log and poled himself across, and found, down in
+the keel of the boat, the mark of a man’s bare foot driven deep into the
+wood; but there was no coin or other trace to show who it might be.
+
+Time went on; the old ferryman was all bowed down with age, and his body
+was racked with pains. So slow was he now in making the passage of the
+stream, that all travellers who knew those parts took a road higher up
+the bank, where a stronger ferryman plied.
+
+Winter came; and hunger and want pressed hard at the old man’s door. One
+day while he drew his net along the stream, he felt the shock of a great
+fish striking against the meshes down below, and presently, as the net
+came in, he saw a shape like living silver, leaping and darting to and
+fro to find some way of escape. Up to the bank he landed it, a great
+gasping fish.
+
+When he was about to kill it, he saw, to his astonishment, tears running
+out of its eyes, that gazed at him and seemed to reproach him for his
+cruelty. As he drew back, the Fish said: “Why should you kill me, who
+wish to live?”
+
+The old man, altogether bewildered at hearing himself thus addressed,
+answered: “Since I and my wife are hungry, and God gave you to be eaten,
+I have good reason for killing you.”
+
+“I could give you something worth far more than a meal,” said the Fish,
+“if you would spare my life.”
+
+“We are old,” said the ferryman, “and want only to end our days in peace.
+To-day we are hungry; what can be more good for us than a meal which will
+give us strength for the morrow, which is the new year?”
+
+The Fish said: “To-night some one will come and unfasten your boat, and
+ferry himself over, and you know nothing of it till the morning, when you
+see the craft moored out yonder by the further bank.”
+
+The old man remembered how the thing had happened in previous years,
+directly the Fish spoke. “Ah, you know that then! How is it?” he asked.
+
+“When you go back to your hut at night to sleep, I am here in the water,”
+said the Fish. “I see what goes on.”
+
+“What goes on, then?” asked the old man, very curious to know who the
+strange traveller might be.
+
+“Ah,” said the Fish, “if you could only catch him in your boat, he could
+give you something you might wish for! I tell you this: do you and your
+wife keep watch in the boat all night, and when he comes, and you have
+ferried him into mid-stream, where he cannot escape, then throw your net
+over him and hold him till he pays you for all your ferryings.”
+
+“How shall he pay me? All my ferryings of a lifetime!”
+
+“Make him take you to the land of Returning Time. There, at least, you
+can end your days in peace.”
+
+The old man said: “You have told me a strange thing; and since I mean to
+act on it, I suppose I must let you go. If you have deceived me, I trust
+you may yet die a cruel death.”
+
+The Fish answered: “Do as I tell you, and you shall die a happy one.”
+And, saying this, he slipped down into the water and disappeared.
+
+The ferryman went back to his wife supperless, and said to her: “Wife,
+bring a net, and come down into the boat!” And he told her the story of
+the Fish and of the yearly traveller.
+
+They sat long together under the dark bank, looking out over the quiet
+and cold moonlit waters, till the midnight hour. The air was chill, and
+to keep themselves warm they covered themselves over with the net and lay
+down in the bottom of the boat. It was the very hour when the old year
+dies and the new year is born.
+
+Before they well knew that they had been asleep, they started to feel the
+rocking of the boat, and found themselves out upon the broad waters of
+the river. And there in the fore-part of the boat, clear and sparkling in
+the moonlight, stood a naked man of shining silver. He was bending upon
+the pole of the boat, and his long hair fell over it right down into the
+water.
+
+The old couple rose up quietly, and unwinding themselves from the net,
+threw it over the Silver Man, over his head and hands and feet, and
+dragged him down into the bottom of the boat.
+
+The old man caught the ferry pole, and heaved the boat still into the
+middle of the stream. As he did so a gentle shock came to the heart of
+each; feebly it fluttered and sank low. “Oh, wife!” sighed the old man,
+and reached out his hand for hers.
+
+The Silver Man lay still in the folds of the net, and looked at them with
+a wise and quiet gaze. “What would you have of me?” he said, and his
+voice was far off and low.
+
+They said, “Bring us into the land of Returning Time.”
+
+The Silver Man said: “Only once can you go there, and once return.”
+
+They both answered “We wish once to go there, and once return.”
+
+So he promised them that they should have the whole of their request; and
+they unloosed him from the net, and landed all together on the further
+bank.
+
+Up the hill they went, following the track of the Silver Man. Presently
+they reached its crest; and there before them lay all the howling winter
+of the world.
+
+The Silver Man turned his face and looked back; and looking back it
+became all young, and ruddy, and bright. The ferryman and his wife gazed
+at him, both speechless at the wonderful change. He took their hands,
+making them turn the way by which they had come; below their feet was
+a deep black gulf, and beyond and away lay nothing but a dark starless
+hollow of air.
+
+“Now,” said their guide, “you have but to step forward one step, and you
+shall be in the land of Returning Time.”
+
+They loosed hold of his hands, joined clasp, husband with wife, and at
+one step upon what seemed gulf beneath their feet, found themselves in
+a green and flowery land. There were perfumed valleys and grassy hills,
+whose crops stretched down before the breeze; thick fleecy clouds crossed
+their tops, and overhead, amid a blue air rang the shrill trilling
+of birds. Behind lay, fading mistily as a dream, the bare world they
+had left; and fast on his forward road, growing small to them from a
+distance, went the Silver Man, a shining point on the horizon.
+
+The ferryman and his wife looked, and saw youth in each other’s faces
+beginning to peep out through the furrows of age; each step they took
+made them grow younger and stronger; years fell from them like worn-out
+rags as they went down into the valleys of the land of Returning Time.
+
+How fast Time returned! Each step made the change of a day, and every
+mile brought them five years back toward youth. When they came down to
+the streams that ran in the bed of each valley, the ferryman and his
+wife felt their prime return to them. He saw the gold come back into her
+locks, and she the brown into his. Their lips became open to laughter and
+song. “Oh, how good,” they cried, “to have lived all our lives poor, to
+come at last to this!”
+
+They drank water out of the streams, and tasted the fruit from the trees
+that grew over them; till presently, being tired for mere joy, they lay
+down in the grass to rest. They slept hand within hand and cheek against
+cheek, and, when they woke, found themselves quite young again, just at
+the age when they were first married in the years gone by.
+
+The ferryman started up and felt the desire of life strong in his blood.
+“Come!” he said to his wife, “or we shall become too young with lingering
+here. Now we have regained our youth, let us go back into the world once
+more!”
+
+His wife hung upon his hand, “Are we not happy enough,” she asked, “as it
+is? Why should we return?”
+
+“But,” he cried, “we shall grow too young; now we have youth and life at
+its best let us return! Time goes too fast with us; we are in danger of
+it carrying us away.”
+
+She said no further word, but followed up toward the way by which they
+had entered. And yet, in spite of her wish to remain, as she went her
+young blood frisked. Presently coming to the top of a hill, they set off
+running and racing; at the bottom they looked at each other, and saw
+themselves boy and girl once more.
+
+“We have stayed here too long!” said the ferryman, and pressed on.
+
+“Oh, the birds,” sighed she, “and the flowers, and the grassy hills to
+run on, we are leaving behind!” But still the boy had the wish for a
+man’s life again, and urged her on; and still with every step they grew
+younger and younger. At length, two small children, they came to the
+border of that enchanted land, and saw beyond the world bleak and wintry
+and without leaf. Only a further step was wanted to bring them face to
+face once more with the hard battle of life.
+
+Tears rose in the child-wife’s eyes: “If we go,” she said, “we can never
+return!” Her husband looked long at her wistful face; he, too, was more
+of a child now, and was forgetting his wish to be a man again.
+
+He took hold of her hand and turned round with her, and together they
+faced once more the flowery orchards, and the happy watered valleys.
+
+Away down there light streams tinkled, and birds called. Downwards they
+went, slowly at first, then with dancing feet, as with shoutings and
+laughter they ran.
+
+Down into the level fields they ran; their running was turned to a
+toddling; their toddling to a tumbling; their tumbling to a slow crawl
+upon hands and feet among the high grass and flowers; till at last they
+were lying side by side, curled up into a cuddly ball, chuckling and
+dimpling and crowing to the insects and birds that passed over them.
+
+Then they heard the sweet laughter of Father Time; and over the hill he
+came, young, ruddy, and shining, and gathered them up sound asleep on the
+old boat by the ferry.
+
+                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+                            London & Edinburgh
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75624 ***