as he spoke he winked one eye at Cinderella, beckoned towards
her with his cup of ale, and took a deep draught to her health. "I shall
tell you," said he, as soon as he had caught his breath again, "a
story about an angel and a poor man who travelled with him, and all the
wonderful things the poor man saw the angel do."

"That," said the Blacksmith who made Death sit in his pear-tree until
the wind whistled through his ribs--"that, methinks, is a better thing
to tell for a sermon than a story."

"Whether or no that shall be so," said St. George, "you shall presently
hear for yourselves."

He took another deep draught of ale, and then cleared his throat.

"Stop a bit, my friend," said Ali Baba. "What is your story about?"

"It is," said St. George, "about--"

The Fruit of Happiness

Once upon a time there was a servant who served a wise man, and cooked
for him his cabbage and his onions and his pot-herbs and his broth, day
after day, time in and time out, for seven years.

In those years the servant was well enough contented, but no one likes
to abide in the same place forever, and so one day he took it into his
head that he would like to go out into the world to see what kind of a
fortune a man might make there for himself. "Very well," says the wise
man, the servant's master; "you have served me faithfully these seven
years gone, and now that you ask leave to go you shall go. But it is
little or nothing in the way of money that I can give you, and so you
will have to be content with what I can afford. See, here is a little
pebble, and its like is not to be found in the seven kingdoms, for
whoever holds it in his mouth can hear while he does so all that the
birds and the beasts say to one another. Take it--it is yours, and, if
you use it wisely, it may bring you a fortune."

The servant would rather have had the money in hand than the magic
pebble, but, as nothing better was to be had, he took the little stone,
and, bidding his master good-bye, trudged out into the world, to seek
his fortune. Well, he jogged on and on, paying his way with the few
pennies he had saved in his seven years of service, but for all of his
travelling nothing of good happened to him until, one morning, he came
to a lonely place where there stood a gallows, and there he sat him down
to rest, and it is just in such an unlikely place as this that a man's
best chance of fortune comes to him sometimes.

As the servant sat there, the