you wish."




THE SACK OF EMERALDS

One bad October night in the high wolds beyond Wiltshire, with a north
wind chaunting of winter, with the old leaves letting go their hold
one by one from branches and dropping down to decay, with a mournful
sound of owls, and in fearsome loneliness, there trudged in broken
boots and in wet and windy rags an old man, stooping low under a sack
of emeralds. It were easy to see had you been travelling late on that
inauspicious night, that the burden of the sack was far too great for
the poor old man that bore it. And had you flashed a lantern in his
face there was a look there of hopelessness and fatigue that would
have told you it was no wish of his that kept him tottering on under
that bloated sack.

When the menacing look of the night and its cheerless sounds, and the
cold, and the weight of the sack, had all but brought him to the door
of death, and he had dropped his sack onto the road and was dragging
it on behind him, just as he felt that his final hour was come, and
come (which was worse) as he held the accursed sack, just then he saw
the bulk and the black shape of the Sign of the Lost Shepherd loom up
by the ragged way. He opened the door and staggered into the light
and sank on a bench with his huge sack beside him.

All this you had seen had you been on that lonely road, so late on
those bitter wolds, with their outlines vast and mournful in the dark,