to which some travellers have been, but whence none ever returned
alive."

"By the great Jove, that sounds promising! I would like to see that
town if my errand were not so urgent."

But the old fellow shook his shaggy head and turned a shade yellower.
"It is no place for decent folk," he growled. "I myself once passed
within a mile of its outskirts at dusk, and saw the unholy little
people's lanterned processions starting for the shrine of Queen Yang,
who, tradition says, killed herself and a thousand babies with her when
we took this land."

"My word, that was a holocaust! Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It
would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society."

Again the woodman frowned. "Do as I bid you, son. You are too young
and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road:
shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap."

"And as I have very urgent and very important business with him,
comrade, no doubt your advice is good. I will call on Princess Yang
some other day. And now goodbye! Rougher but friendlier shelter than
you have given me no man could ask for. I am downright sorry to part
with you in this lonely land. If ever we meet again--" but we never
did! The honest old churl clasped me into his hairy bosom three times,
stuffed my wallet with dry fruit and bread, and once more repeating his
directions, sent me on my lonely way.

I confess I sighed while turning into the forest, and looked back more
than once at his retreating form. The loneliness of my position, the
hopelessness of my venture, welled up in my heart after that good
comradeship, and when the hut was out of sight I went forward down the
green grass road, chin on chest, for twenty minutes in the deepest
dejection. But, thank Heaven, I was born with a tough spirit, and
possess a mind which has learned in many fights to give brave counsel
to my spirit, and thus presently I shook myself together, setting my
face boldly to the quest and the day's work.

It was not so clear a morning as the previous one, and a steamy wind on
what at sea I should have called the starboard bow, as I pressed
forward to the distant hill, had a curiously subduing effect on my
thoughts, and filled the forest glades with a tremulous unreality like
to nothing on our earth, and distinctly embarrassing to a stranger in a
strange land. Small birds in that quaint atmospheric haze looked like
condors, butterflies like