d a bite from the snake!" I answered--not believing, I confess,
that there was any snake.

"It would not hurt YOU!" she replied. "--Wait a moment."

She tore from her garment the two wide borders that met in front, and
kneeling on one knee, made me put first my left foot, then my right on
the other, and bound them about with the thick embroidered strips.

"You have left the ends hanging, princess!" I said.

"I have nothing to cut them off with; but they are not long enough to
get entangled," she replied.

I turned to the tree, and began to climb.

Now in Bulika the cold after sundown was not so great as in certain
other parts of the country--especially about the sexton's cottage; yet
when I had climbed a little way, I began to feel very cold, grew still
colder as I ascended, and became coldest of all when I got among the
branches. Then I shivered, and seemed to have lost my hands and feet.

There was hardly any wind, and the branches did not sway in the
least, yet, as I approached the summit, I became aware of a peculiar
unsteadiness: every branch on which I placed foot or laid hold, seemed
on the point of giving way. When my head rose above the branches
near the top, and in the open moonlight I began to look about for the
blossom, that instant I found myself drenched from head to foot. The
next, as if plunged in a stormy water, I was flung about wildly, and
felt myself sinking. Tossed up and down, tossed this way and tossed that
way, rolled over and over, checked, rolled the other way and tossed up
again, I was sinking lower and lower. Gasping and gurgling and choking,
I fell at last upon a solid bottom.

"I told you so!" croaked a voice in my ear.

CHAPTER XXVIII. I AM SILENCED

I rubbed the water out of my eyes, and saw the raven on the edge of a
huge stone basin. With the cold light of the dawn reflected from his
glossy plumage, he stood calmly looking down upon me. I lay on my back
in water, above which, leaning on my elbows, I just lifted my face. I
was in the basin of the large fountain constructed by my father in the
middle of the lawn. High over me glimmered the thick, steel-shiny stalk,
shooting, with a torrent uprush, a hundred feet into the air, to spread
in a blossom of foam.

Nettled at the coolness of the raven's remark,

"You told me nothing!" I said.

"I told you to do nothing any one you distrusted asked you!"

"Tut! how was mortal to remember that?"

"You will not forget the co