it for
whatever they may need."

"How so?" asked the prince.

"If a man has many loaves he cannot eat them all," answered the old man;
"therefore he goes to his neighbor and says, 'I have bread and thou hast
a coin of gold--let us exchange;' so he receives the gold and goes to
another man, saying, 'Thou hast two houses and I have none; lend me one
of thy houses to live in, and I will give thee my gold;' thus again they
exchange."

"It is well," said the prince; "but in time of drought, if there is no
bread in a city, can they make it of gold?"

"Not so," answered the old man, "but they must send their gold to a city
where there is food, and bring that back instead of it."

"But if there was a famine all over the world," asked the prince, "what
would they do then?"

"Why, then, and only then," said the old man, "they must starve, and the
gold would be nought, for it can only be changed for that which _is_; it
cannot make that which is not."

"And where do they get gold?" asked the prince. "Is it the precious
fruit of some rare tree, or have they whereby they can draw it down from
the sky at sunset?"

"Some of it," said the old man, "they dig out of the ground."

Then he told the prince of ancient rivers running through terrible
deserts, whose sands glitter with golden grains and are yellow in the
fierce heat of the sun, and of dreary mines where the Indian slaves work
in gangs tied together, never seeing the light of day; and lastly (for
he was a man of much knowledge, and had travelled far), he told him of
the valley of the Sacramento in the New World, and of those mountains
where the people of Europe send their criminals, and where now their
free men pour forth to gather gold, and dig for it as hard as if for
life; sitting up by it at night lest any should take it from them,
giving up houses and country, and wife and children, for the sake of a
few feet of mud, whence they dig clay that glitters as they wash it; and
how they sift it and rock it as patiently as if it were their own
children in the cradle, and afterward carry it in their bosoms, and
forego on account of it safety and rest.

"But, prince," he went on, seeing that the young man was absorbed in his
narrative, "if you would pass your word to me never to betray me, I
would procure for you a sight of the external world, and in a trance you
should see those places where gold is dug, and traverse those regions
forbidden to your mortal footsteps."