sterpiece of wit to that gentle savage; and when I "took off" the
tricks and foibles of some of my superiors--Heaven forgive me for such
treason!--he listened with the exquisite open-mouthed delight of one
who wanders in a brand-new world of mirth.

We drank and laughed over that strong beer till the little owls outside
raised their voice in combined accord, and then the woodman, shaking
the last remnant of his sleepy wits together, and giving a reproachful
look at me for finally passing him the gourd empty to the last drop,
rose, threw a fur on a pile of dead grass at one side of the hut, and
bid me sleep, "for his brain was giddy with the wonders of the
incredible and ludicrous sphere which I had lately inhabited."

Slowly the fire died away; slowly the quivering gold and black
arabesques on the walls merged in a red haze as the sticks dropped into
tinder, and the great black outline of the hairy monster who had thrown
himself down by the embers rose up the walls against that flush like
the outline of a range of hills against a sunset glow. I listened
drowsily for a space to his snoring and the laughing answer of the
brook outside, and then that ambrosial sleep which is the gentle
attendant of hardship and danger touched my tired eyelids, and I, too,
slept.

My friend was glum the next morning, as they who stay over-long at the
supper flagon are apt to be. He had been at work an hour on his
bark-heaps when I came out into the open, and it was only by a good
deal of diplomacy and some material help in sorting his faggots that he
was got into a better frame of mind. I could not, however, trust his
mood completely, and as I did not want to end so jovial a friendship
with a quarrel, I hurried through our breakfast of dry bread, with
hard-boiled lizard eggs, and then settling my reckoning with one of the
brass buttons from my coat, which he immediately threaded, with every
evidence of extreme gratification, on a string of trinkets hanging
round his neck, asked him the way to Ar-hap's capital.

"Your way is easy, friend, as long as you keep to the straight path and
have yonder two-humped mountain in front. To the left is the sea, and
behind the hill runs the canal and road by which all traffic comes or
goes to Ar-hap. But above all things pass not to the hills right, for
no man goes there; there away the forests are thick as night, and in
their perpetual shadows are the ruins of a Hither city, a haunted fairy
town