wicked woman she had been.

THE WISHING-POT

[Illustration]

THE WISHING-POT

Tulip was the son of a poor but prudent mother; from the moment of his
birth she had trained him to count ten before ever he wanted or asked
for anything. An otherwise reckless youth, he acquired an intrinsic
value through the practice of this habit. Only once, just as he was
reaching, but had not quite reached, years of discretion, did his
habit of precaution fail him; and this same failure became in the end
the opening of his fortunes.

Bathing one day in the river, to whose banks the woods ran down in
steep terraces, he heard a voice come singing along one of the upper
slopes; and looking up under the boughs of cedar and sycamore, he saw
a pair of green feet go dancing by, up and down like grasshoppers on
the prance.

There was such rhythm in them, and such sweetness in the voice, that
his heart was out of him before he could harness it to the number ten,
and he came out of the water the most natural and forlorn of lovers.

Before he was dressed the green feet and the voice were gone, and
before he got home his health and his appetite seemed to have gone
also. He pined industriously from day to day, and spent all his hours
in searching among the woods by the river side for his lady of the
dear green feet. He did not know so much as the size or colour of her
face; the sound of her voice alone, and the running up and down of her
feet, had, as he told his mother, 'decimated his affections.'

In his trouble he could think of only one possible remedy, and that he
counted well over, knowing its risk. Away in the loneliest part of the
forest there lived a wise woman, to whom, now and then, folk went for
help when everything else had failed them. So he had heard tell of a
certain Wishing-Pot that was hers in which people might see the thing
they desired most, and into which for a fee she allowed lovers and
other poor fools of fortune to look. One thing, however, was told
against the virtues of this Wishing-Pot, that though many had had a
sight of it, and their wishes revealed to them therein, others had
gone and had never again returned to their homes, but had vanished
altogether from men's sight, nor had any news ever been heard of them
after. There were some wise folk who held that they had only gone
elsewhere to seek the fortune that the Wishing-Pot had shown to them.
Nevertheless, for the most part the wise woman and her Wishi