se I find that life is grim,
Without its thorns, why even beauty's dead!"

Gud wondered, yet it would not be polite
To break the old man's tale of woe.
"I'd like to know," the ancient said, "the candle-light--
When we have blown it out where does it go?"

"I do not know," said Gud, "do you?"
"Ah yes," replied the old man, "I know very well,
For I remember as if it were but yesterday how
Half dead and famished, the desert in my eyes
And hunger written on my lips
I stood there like a captain on a hill
Dreaming of his broken ships.

"I kicked aside a stone that crushed a skull;
When from that mouth that mouldered there,
There came as if it were the voice of doom,
A haunting cry that chilled the air.

"Then suddenly I laughed and turned my heel
In that dead face; and laughing still
I danced along the sands, played hide and seek
And chased my shadow up a hill."

And when the old man had done with these foolish words he suddenly
seized the rose upon his coat and tore it off and cast it from him. Then
he picked up his tattered goose quill pen and dipped it in a pool and
began to write furiously.

When the old man paused and stared up vacantly, Gud spoke to him and
asked: "What are you writing?"

Thereupon the old man made answer and said to Gud: "I am writing a cook
book for cannibals."

Being a vegetarian in theory if not in practice, Gud was not interested,
and he passed on, walking rapidly, so that he presently overtook a man
who was following stealthily after yet another man.

He who followed stooped frequently and, with a two-pronged instrument,
picked up objects from the pavement. These he cast into a brazier that
he carried, wherein that which he picked up sizzled and burned and made
a stench in its burning.

Gud wot not what the man did and would know, so he plucked at the sleeve
of yet another citizen of that place and asked of him: "Who be these
two, the one that walks alone with his face aloft, and the other that
follows after, stooping and searching for filth?"

Said the citizen: "These be our Genius and our Critic."

"And what do they?" asked Gud.

To this the citizen replied: "The Genius talks words, and the Critic
follows after, and, as the words fall from the lips of Genius, the
Critic picks them up with the tongs of contempt and burns them in the
brazier of public opinion."

"But why," asked