riding a white horse. He
wore a grey overcoat and a cocked hat. I became aware of a rhythmical
tramping: a noise of hundreds and hundreds of hoofs, a champing of
bits, and the tramp of innumerable feet and the rumble of guns. In the
distance there was a hill with crenelated battlements round it; it was
crowned with the domes and minarets of several churches, taller and
greater than all the other churches in sight. These minarets shone out
clean-cut and distinct against the ruddy sky.

The short man on horseback looked back for a moment at this hill. He
took a pinch of snuff.

THE CONQUEROR

When the ancient gods were turned out of Olympus, and the groan of dying
Pan shook the world like an earthquake, none of the fallen deities was
so disconsolate as Proserpine. She wandered across the world, assuming
now this shape and now that, but nowhere could she find a resting-place
or a home. In the Southern country which she regarded as her own,
whatever shape or disguise she assumed, whether that of a gleaner or of
an old woman begging for alms, the country people would scent something
uncanny about her and chase her from the place. Thus it was that she
left the Southern country, which she loved; she said farewell to the
azure skies, the hills covered with corn and fringed everywhere with
rose bushes, the white oxen, the cypress, the olive, the vine, the
croaking frogs, and the million fireflies; and she sought the green
pastures and the woods of a Northern country.

One evening, not long after her arrival (it was Midsummer Eve), as
she was wandering in a thick wood, she noticed that the trees and the
under-growth were twinkling with a myriad soft flames which reminded her
of the fireflies of her own country, and presently she perceived that
these flames were stars which, soft as dew and bright as moonbeams,
formed the diadems crowning the hair of unearthly shapes. These shapes
were like those of men and maidens, transfigured and rendered strange
and delicate, as light as foam, and radiant as dragonflies hovering over
a pool. They were rimmed with rainbow-coloured films, and sometimes
they flew and sometimes they danced, but they rarely seemed to touch
the ground. And as Proserpine approached them, in the sad majesty of
her fallen divinity, they gathered round her in a circle and bowed down
before her. And one of them, taller than the rest, advanced towards her
and said:--

"We are the Fairies, and for a long time w