to say, so he hemmed and hawed, an' finally he says,
'Maybe I done it because I wanted to, an' maybe I done it because I
didn't want to.' 'All right,' said the devil; 'if you done it because
you wanted to, I don't owe you nothin', an' if you done it because you
didn't want to, there ain't nothin' I can pay you.' An' he sunk in the
ground, with his thumb to his nose an' his fingers a-wigglin' at the
blacksmith."

I saw the application of the story. One could settle with money for
labour when the labourer was free, but when the labourer was not free,
when he had used his breath and his muscle under a master, money could
make no final settlement.

Ugly accounts to run in a world where the scheme of things is eternally
fair, and worse, maybe, if carried over for adjustment into the Court of
Final Equity! The remark of Ump came back like a line of ancient wisdom,
"Peace is a purty thing."

CHAPTER XI

THE WARDENS OF THE RIVER

While men are going about with a bit of lens and a measure of acid,
explaining the hidden things of this world, I should be very glad if
they would explain why it is that the evening of an autumn day always
recalls the lost Kingdom of the Little. The sun squinting behind the
mountains, the blue haze deepening in the hollows of the hills, the cool
air laden with faint odours from the nooks and corners of the
world,--what have these to do with the land of the work-a-day?

Long and long ago in that other country it meant that the fairies were
gathering under the hill for another raid on the province of the goblins
across the sedge-fields; that the owls were going up on the ridges to
whisper with the moon; that the elves one by one, in their quaint yellow
coats, were stealing along under the oak trees on the trail of the wolf
spider. But what can it mean in the grown-up country?

When the Golden Land is lost to us, when turning suddenly we find the
enchanted kingdom vanished, do we give up the hope of finding it again?
We know that it is somewhere across the world, and we ought to find it,
and we know, too, that its out-country is like these October afternoons,
and our hearts beat wildly for a moment, then the truth strikes and we
see that this is not The Land.

But it brings the memory of the heyday of that other land, where, in my
babyhood, like the kings of Bagdad, I had a hundred bay horses in their
stables, each bridled with a coloured woollen string, and stalled in the
palings of th