ountain pass with sudden fury,
uprooting trees a century old, and rending mighty rocks with sword
thrusts of its lightning. And when it passed Aldebaran lay prone upon
the earth borne down by rocks and fallen trees. Lay as if dead until two
passing goat-herds found him and bore him down in pity to their hut.

Long weeks went by before the fever craze and pains began to leave him,
and when at last he crawled out in the sun, he found himself a poor
misshapen thing, all maimed and marred, with twisted back and face all
drawn awry, and foot that dragged. One hand hung nerveless by his side.
Never more would it be strong enough to use the Sword. He could not even
draw it from its scabbard.

As in a daze he looked upon himself, thinking some hideous nightmare had
him in its hold. "This is not _I_!" he cried, in horror at the thought.
Then as the truth began to pierce his soul, he sat with starting eyes
and lips that gibbered in cold fear, the while they still persisted in
their fierce denial. "This is not _I_!"

Again he said it and again as if his frenzied words could work a
miracle and make him as he was before. Then when the sickening sense of
his calamity swept over him like a flood in all its fulness, he cast
himself upon the earth and prayed to die. Despair had seized him. But
Death comes not at such a call; kind Death, who waits that one may have
a chance to rise again and grapple with the foe that downed him, and
conquering, wipe the stigma coward from his soul.

So with Aldebaran. At first it seemed that he could not endure to face
the round of useless days now stretching out before him. An eagle,
broken-winged and drooping in a cage, he sat within the goat-herd's hut
and gloomed upon his lot, and cursed the vital force within that would
not let him die.

To fall asleep with all the world within one's grasp and waken
empty-handed--that is small bane to one who may spring up again, and by
sheer might wrest all his treasures back from Fortune. But to wake
helpless as well as empty-handed, the strength for ever gone from arms
that were invincible; to crawl, a poor crushed worm, the mark for all
men's pity, where one had thought to win the meed of all men's praise,
ah, then to live is agony! Each breath becomes a venomed adder's sting.

Most of all Aldebaran thought of Vesta. The stroke that marred his
comeliness and took his strength had robbed him of all power to win his
happiness. It was written "by the hearth o