t"; but it is so difficult to adopt it that the judgment of few
men hits the nail on the head. On the contrary, in the sea of human
affairs, the greater part are fishers in smooth waters, who catch
crabs; and he who thinks to take the most exact measure of the object
at which he aims often shoots widest of the mark. The consequence of
this is that all are running pell-mell, all toiling in the dark, all
thinking crookedly, all acting child's-play, all judging at random, and
with a haphazard blow of a foolish resolution bringing upon themselves
a bitter repentance; as was the case with the King of Shady-Grove; and
you shall hear how it fared with him if you summon me within the circle
of modesty with the bell of courtesy, and give me a little attention.

It is said that there was once a king of Shady-Grove named Milluccio,
who was so devoted to the chase, that he neglected the needful affairs
of his state and household to follow the track of a hare or the flight
of a thrush. And he pursued this road so far that chance one day led
him to a thicket, which had formed a solid square of earth and trees to
prevent the horses of the Sun from breaking through. There, upon a most
beautiful marble stone, he found a raven, which had just been killed.

The King, seeing the bright red blood sprinkled upon the white, white
marble, heaved a deep sigh and exclaimed, "O heavens! and cannot I have
a wife as white and red as this stone, and with hair and eyebrows as
black as the feathers of this raven?" And he stood for a while so
buried in this thought that he became a counterpart to the stone, and
looked like a marble image making love to the other marble. And this
unhappy fancy fixing itself in his head, as he searched for it
everywhere with the lanthorn of desire, it grew in four seconds from a
picktooth to a pole, from a crab-apple to an Indian pumpkin, from
barber's embers to a glass furnace, and from a dwarf to a giant;
insomuch that he thought of nothing else than the image of that object
encrusted in his heart as stone to stone. Wherever he turned his eyes
that form was always presented to him which he carried in his breast;
and forgetting all besides, he had nothing but that marble in his head;
in short, he became in a manner so worn away upon the stone that he was
at last as thin as the edge of a penknife; and this marble was a
millstone which crushed his life, a slab of porphyry upon which the
colours of his days were ground and