The Keeper of the Gate drew a little book from the breast of his
robe
and turned over the pages.

"Certainly," he said, with a curious look at the man, "your name
is here;
and you shall see your mansion if you will follow me."

It seemed as if they must have walked miles and miles, through
the
vast city, passing street after street of houses larger and
smaller,
of gardens richer and poorer, but all full of beauty and delight.

They came into a kind of suburb, where there were many small
cottages,
with plots of flowers, very lowly, but bright and fragrant.
Finally they reached an open field, bare and lonely-looking.
There were two or three little bushes in it, without flowers,
and the grass was sparse and thin. In the center of the field
was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter.
It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and

fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains,
by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material.

There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut.
It shrank and drooped and faded in its barren field, and seemed
to
cling only by sufferance to the edge of the splendid city.