one bound, striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him
with his pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and
faintness, became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to
drag himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly
saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his
hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to him,
and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him again and
again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he left him, the
child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and pain, crept back
home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who wept over him; and the
child found that his guardian came to visit him, as kind and gentle as
ever. And at last one day when he sate beside the child, holding his
hand, stroking his hair, and telling him an old tale to comfort him,
the child summoned up courage to ask him a question about the garden
and the wood; but at the first word his guardian dropped his hand, and
left him without a word.

And then the child lay and mused with fierce and rebellious thoughts.
He said to himself, "If my guardian had told me where I might not go;
if he had said to me, 'in the inner garden are unwholesome fruits, and
in the wood are savage beasts; and though I am strong and powerful, yet
I have not strength to root up the poisonous plants and make the place
a wilderness; and I cannot put a fence about it, or a fence about the
wood, that no one should enter; but I warn you that you must not enter,
and I entreat you for the love I bear you not to go thither,'" then the
child thought that he would not have made question, but would have
obeyed him willingly; and again he thought that, if he had indeed
ventured in, and had eaten of the evil fruits, and been wounded by the
savage stag, yet if his guardian had comforted him, and prayed him
lovingly not to enter to his hurt, that then he would have loved his
guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too that, if his
guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then said to him with
tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt him, but that thus and
thus only could he learn the vileness of the place, then he would have
not only forgiven the ill-usage, but would even have loved to endure it
patiently. But what the child could not understand was that his
guardian should now be tender and gracious, and at another time hard
a