ould meet no more, for my fancy is weakening as the years slip by,
and I go ever more seldom into the Lands of Dream. Then we clasped
hands, uncouthly on his part, for it is not the method of greeting in
his country, and he commended my soul to the care of his own gods, to
his little lesser gods, the humble ones, to the gods that bless
Belzoond.

A SHOP IN GO-BY STREET

I said I must go back to Yann again and see if _Bird of the River_
still plies up and down and whether her bearded captain commands her
still or whether he sits in the gate of fair Belzoond drinking at
evening the marvellous yellow wine that the mountaineer brings down
from the Hian Min. And I wanted to see the sailors again who came
from Durl and Duz and to hear from their lips what befell Perdondaris
when its doom came up without warning from the hills and fell on that
famous city. And I wanted to hear the sailors pray at night each to
his own god, and to feel the wind of the evening coolly arise when the
sun went flaming away from that exotic river. For I thought never
again to see the tide of Yann, but when I gave up politics not long
ago the wings of my fancy strengthened, though they had erstwhile
drooped, and I had hopes of coming behind the East once more where
Yann like a proud white war-horse goes through the Lands of Dream.

Yet I had forgotten the way to those little cottages on the edge of
the fields we know whose upper windows, though dim with antique
cobwebs, look out on the fields we know not and are the starting-point
of all adventure in all the Lands of Dream.

I therefore made enquiries. And so I came to be directed to the shop
of a dreamer who lives not far from the Embankment in the City. Among
so many streets as there are in the city it is little wonder that
there is one that has never been seen before; it is named Go-by Street
and runs out of the Strand if you look very closely. Now when you
enter this man's shop you do not go straight to the point but you ask
him to sell you something, and if it is anything with which he can
supply you he hands it you and wishes you good-morning. It is his
way. And many have been deceived by asking for some unlikely thing,
such as the oyster-shell from which was taken one of those single
pearls that made the gates of Heaven in Revelations, and finding that
the old man had it in stock.

He was comatose when I went into the shop, his heavy lids almost
covered his little eyes; he s