his days, and the end trouble, and vain, vain his endeavour: and
woman--who shall tell of it?--her doom is written with man's by
listless, careless gods with their faces to other spheres.

Somewhat thus he began, and then inspiration seized him, and all the
trouble in the beauty of his song may not be set down by me: there was
much of gladness in it, and all mingled with grief: it was like the
way of man: it was like our destiny.

Sobs arose at his song, sighs came back along echoes: seneschals,
soldiers, sobbed, and a clear cry made the maidens; like rain the
tears came down from gallery to gallery.

All round the Queen of the Woods was a storm of sobbing and sorrow.

But no, she would not weep.

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their
evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a
bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they
have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for
sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they
need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is
to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of
famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little
trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would
soon be full again.

Their tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer--_ho
rhoos okeanoio_, as he called it--which surrounds the world. And where
the river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins'
gluttonous sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to
their steps. Some nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees
drained there with their colossal roots from both banks of the river.

There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed.

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary
Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among
makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now
he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture,
undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was
sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their
larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities
of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to
the tower saying that all was well.

It may be