ne of our four. And there
in the darkness on the grizzly coast, for darkness was swooping
slantwise down the sky as though with some evil purpose, there stood
that lonely, gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be
found in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars,
beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered [See any dictionary, but in
vain.] at Neepy Thang. And there on a lower branch within easy reach
he clearly saw the Bird of the Difficult Eye sitting upon the nest for
which she is famous. Her face was towards those three inscrutable
mountains, far-off on the other side of the risky seas, whose hidden
valleys are Fairyland. Though not yet autumn in the fields we know, it
was close on midwinter here, the moment as Thang knew when those eggs
hatch out. Had he miscalculated and arrived a minute too late? Yet the
bird was even now about to migrate, her pinions fluttered and her gaze
was toward Fairyland. Thang hoped and muttered a prayer to those pagan
gods whose spite and vengeance he had most reason to fear. It seems
that it was too late or a prayer too small to placate them, for there
and then the stroke of midwinter came and the eggs hatched out in the
roar of Shiroora Shan or ever the bird was gone with her difficult eye
and it was a bad business indeed for Neepy Thang; I haven't the heart
to tell you any more.

"'Ere," said Lord Castlenorman some few weeks later to Messrs.
Grosvenor and Campbell, "you aren't 'arf taking your time about those
emeralds."

The Long Porter's Tale

There are things that are known only to the long porter of Tong Tong
Tarrup as he sits and mumbles memories to himself in the little
bastion gateway.

He remembers the war there was in the halls of the gnomes; and how the
fairies came for the opals once, which Tong Tong Tarrup has; and the
way that the giants went through the fields below, he watching from
his gateway: he remembers quests that are even yet a wonder to the
gods. Who dwells in those frozen houses on the high bare brink of the
world not even he has told me, and he is held to be garrulous. Among
the elves, the only living things ever seen moving at that awful
altitude where they quarry turquoise on Earth's highest crag, his name
is a byword for loquacity wherewith they mock the talkative.

His favourite story if you offer him bash--the drug of which he is
fondest, and for which he will give his service in war to the elves
against the gobli