Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of
London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know:
for we have new worlds here.



THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE


In the morning of his two hundred and fiftieth year Shepperalk the
centaur went to the golden coffer, wherein the treasure of the
centaurs was, and taking from it the hoarded amulet that his father,
Jyshak, in the year of his prime, had hammered from mountain gold and
set with opals bartered from the gnomes, he put it upon his wrist, and
said no word, but walked from his mother's cavern. And he took with
him too that clarion of the centaurs, that famous silver horn, that in
its time had summoned to surrender seventeen cities of Man, and for
twenty years had brayed at star-girt walls in the Siege of
Tholdenblarna, the citadel of the gods, what time the centaurs waged
their fabulous war and were not broken by any force of arms, but
retreated slowly in a cloud of dust before the final miracle of the
gods that They brought in Their desperate need from Their ultimate
armoury. He took it and strode away, and his mother only sighed and
let him go.

She knew that today he would not drink at the stream coming down from
the terraces of Varpa Niger, the inner land of the mountains, that
today he would not wonder awhile at the sunset and afterwards trot
back to the cavern again to sleep on rushes pulled by rivers that know