th, and think you're the grand author entirely and you
pleasing her. But Lord God, who gave you the stories, know you for a
louse.

"I call to your mind the stories of great English writer--the plays of
the Prince of Denmark, and the poor blind king on the cliff, and the
Scottish chieftain and his terrible wife. The Widow Robinson will not
like those stories, and she will be keeping her white coin... But those
stories will endure forever...

"I will now tell you of Marco Polo, and him leaving China..."

CHAPTER XXI

You must see him now as he was seventeen years after he had come to
China, and fourteen years after his wife, little Golden Bells, had
died, a lean figure of a man, with his hair streaked with gray, a lean,
hard face on him and savage eyes, and all the body of him steel and
whale-bone from riding on the great Khan's business, and riding fast
and furious, so that he might sleep and forget; but forgetting never
came to him... You might think he was a harsh man from his face and
eyes, but he was the straight man in administering justice, and he had
the soft heart for the poor--the heart of Golden Bells. He was easily
moved to anger, but the fine Chinese people never minded him, knowing
he was a suffering man. Though never a word of Golden Bells came from
his mouth, barring maybe that line of Dante's, the saddest line in the
world, and that he used to repeat to himself and no one there:

..."'la bella persona
Che mi fu tolta...che mi fu tolta'; who was
taken from me; Taken! Taken from me!"

And oftentimes a look would come over his face as if he were listening
for a voice to speak--listening, listening, and then a wee harsh laugh
would come from him, very heartbreaking to hear, and whatever was in
his hand, papers or a riding-whip, he would pitch down and walk away...

He had just come in from the borders of the Arctic lands, from giving
the khan's orders to the squat, hairy tribes who live by the icy
shores, and had come to the garden by the Lake of Cranes, the garden
where the Golden Bells of singing and laughter were dumb this armful of
years, and he was alone, and the listening look was on his face, when
there came Kubla and Li Po and the old magician...

Now Kubla was very old, so old he could hardly walk, and very frail,
and Li Po was very old, too, and gray in the face, and sadder in the
eyes than ever, and the magician's white beard had grown to his knees,
but there was no mor