with me that we may dwell there in peace."

"What do you know of peace, and why should you desire it?" asked the
father, with a certain cold contempt in his tone. "You have not yet
lived; and you have certainly not laboured. Rest is for those who have
laboured and grown weary. In that rest that you desire you would have
an empty mind for showman, and of its meagre entertainment you would
tire as speedily as a child. Live first, and watch the puppets of memory
play afterwards. The fields of amaranth will wait for you however long
you live."

But the young man insisted: "I want to find them _now_. And when I have
found them I will come for _you_, mother, dear; and we will return to
them together and be happy and at peace."

But the mother's eyes were troubled with an inexplicable expression. "It
were better that you should wait till I come to _you_," she answered
gently. "As come to you I surely shall--one day. But come not to fetch
me . . . if once you find the fields."

"I surely _shall_ come for you," cried the youth.

"No, no!" implored the mother.

But he smiled on her, and was gone.

It was a long journey, and a toilsome one, and the end of it the youth
could neither learn of nor anticipate.

The fields of amaranth? Yes: all had heard of them. But no one knew any
one who had ever found them. And, for themselves, they were content to
know these waited for them somewhere. They had ties--they had
businesses--they were content to live and wait.

"When I return from them, shall I give you tidings of them?" asked the
young man, earnestly.

"No, no!" They were vehement in their dissuasions that he should not:
finally even fleeing from him in terror at the thought.

And the young man mused perplexedly as he walked on. "Are there
_really_ fields of amaranth for those who can find them?" he asked of a
wrinkled, white-haired wayfarer. "Or is it merely a bait, a delusion,
and a lie?"

"Yes, surely, my son, these fields await us all: else life, at best,
were a sorry game for most of us. It is there we shall rest and reap our
reward."

"But no one seems eager to set out for them and discover them."

"No one?" quoth the old man, looking at him strangely: "there are many
ways of getting there: you have chosen only one. There are other roads,
and crowded ones: though you know nothing of them yet."

The young man brushed past him hot with disdain. He was merely an old
dotard: empty-minded like the rest.

The lure