I think so," was the answer; "that experience is but as of the memory
of the pathways he has trod to a traveller journeying ever onward into
an unknown land. I have been wise only to reap the reward of folly.
Knowledge has ofttimes kept me from my good. I have avoided my old
mistakes only to fall into others that I knew not of. I have reached the
old errors by new roads. Where I have escaped sorrow I have lost joy.
Where I have grasped happiness I have plucked pain also. Now let me go
with Death that I may learn.."

Which was so like the angel of that period, the giving of a gift,
bringing to a man only more trouble. Maybe I am overrating my coolness
of judgment under somewhat startling circumstances, but I am inclined to
think that, had I lived in those days, and had a fairy or an angel come
to me, wanting to give me something--my soul's desire, or the sum of my
ambition, or any trifle of that kind I should have been short with him.

"You pack up that precious bag of tricks of yours," I should have said
to him (it would have been rude, but that is how I should have felt),
"and get outside with it. I'm not taking anything in your line to-day. I
don't require any supernatural aid to get me into trouble. All the worry
I want I can get down here, so it's no good your calling. You take that
little joke of yours,--I don't know what it is, but I know enough not to
want to know,--and run it off on some other idiot. I'm not priggish.
I have no objection to an innocent game of 'catch-questions' in the
ordinary way, and when I get a turn myself. But if I've got to pay
every time, and the stakes are to be my earthly happiness plus my future
existence--why, I don't play. There was the case of Midas; a nice,
shabby trick you fellows played off upon him! making pretence you did
not understand him, twisting round the poor old fellow's words, just for
all the world as though you were a pack of Old Bailey lawyers, trying
to trip up a witness; I'm ashamed of the lot of you, and I tell you
so--coming down here, fooling poor unsuspecting mortals with your
nonsense, as though we had not enough to harry us as it was. Then there
was that other case of the poor old peasant couple to whom you promised
three wishes, the whole thing ending in a black pudding. And they never
got even that. You thought that funny, I suppose. That was your fairy
humour! A pity, I say, you have not, all of you, something better to do
with your time. As I said before,