at
door, and Serafina and Rodriguez entered, and all the hundred bowmen
disappeared.

Here we will leave them, and let these Chronicles end. For whoever
would tell more of Castle Rodriguez must wield one of those ponderous
pens that hangs on the study wall in the house of historians. Great
days in the story of Spain shone on those iron-barred windows, and
things were said in its banqueting chamber and planned in its inner
rooms that sometimes turned that story this way or that, as rocks turn
a young river. And as a traveller meets a mighty river at one of its
bends, and passes on his path, while the river sweeps on to its estuary
and the sea, so I leave the triumphs and troubles of that story which I
touched for one moment by the door of Castle Rodriguez.

My concern is but with Rodriguez and Serafina and to tell that they
lived here in happiness; and to tell that the humble Morano found his
happiness too. For he became the magnificent steward of Castle
Rodriguez, the majordomo, and upon august occasions he wore as much red
plush as he had ever seen in his dreams, when he saw this very event,
sleeping by dying camp-fires. And he slept not upon straw but upon good
heaps of wolf-skins. But pining a little in the second year of his
somewhat lonely splendour, he married one of the maidens of the forest,
the child of a bowman that hunted boars with their king. And all the
green bowmen came and built him a house by the gates of the park,
whence he walked solemnly on proper occasions to wait upon his master.
Morano, good, faithful man, come forward for but a moment out of the
Golden Age and bow across all those centuries to the reader: say one
farewell to him in your Spanish tongue, though the sound of it be no
louder than the sound of shadows moving, and so back to the dim
splendour of the past, for the Senor or Senora shall hear your name no
more.

For years Rodriguez lived a chieftain of the forest, owning the
overlordship of the King of Shadow Valley, whom he and Serafina would
entertain with all the magnificence of which their castle was capable
on such occasions as he appeared before the iron gates. They seldom saw
him. Sometimes they heard his horn as he went by. They heard his bowmen
follow. And all would pass and perhaps they would see none. But upon
occasions he came. He came to the christening of the eldest son of
Rodriguez and Serafina, for whom he was godfather. He came again to see
the boy shoot for the first