should wake the poets. "They sleep so badly while they live," she
said.

I stole on tiptoe upstairs to the little room from whose windows,
looking one way, we see the fields we know and, looking another, those
hilly lands that I sought--almost I feared not to find them. I looked
at once toward the mountains of faëry; the afterglow of the sunset
flamed on them, their avalanches flashed on their violet slopes coming
down tremendous from emerald peaks of ice; and there was the old gap
in the blue-grey hills above the precipice of amethyst whence one sees
the Lands of Dream.

All was still in the room where the poets slept when I came quietly
down. The old witch sat by a table with a lamp, knitting a splendid
cloak of gold and green for a king that had been dead a thousand
years.

"Is it any use," I said, "to the king that is dead that you sit and
knit him a cloak of gold and green?"

"Who knows?" she said.

"What a silly question to ask," said her old black cat who lay curled
by the fluttering fire.

Already the stars were shining on that romantic land when I closed the
witch's door; already the glow-worms were mounting guard for the night
around those magical cottages. I turned and trudged for the gap in
the blue-grey mountains.