esembling the slit of his own drawer.

He had now got the ring on his finger, and must needs try if it would
open the other slits also. And out he drew drawer after drawer full of
gold bracelets and silver bracelets, glass pearls, brooches and rings,
bracelets and laced caps, yarn, night-caps and woollen drawers, coffee,
sugar, groats, tobacco pipes, buttons, hooks and eyes, knives, axes, and
scythes.

He drew out drawer after drawer; there was no end to the display they
made.

But all round about him he heard, as it were, the humming of a crowd and
the tramp of sea-boots. There was a hubbub, as if they were rolling
hogsheads over a bridge and hoisting sails against the wind, and out
from the sea sounded the stroke of oars and the bumping of boats putting
ashore.

Then he began to have an inkling that he had laid to his boat at a
mooring-ring belonging to the underground folk, and had lit right upon
their landing-place where they deposited their wares.

He stood there looking into a drawer of meerschaum pipes. They were
finer than any he had thought it possible to find in the whole world.

Then he felt, as it were, the blow of a heavy hand which tried to thrust
him aside; but, at the same time, some one laughed so merrily close by.
The same instant he saw a young woman in the fore-part of his boat. She
was leaning, with broad shoulders and hairy arms, over a meal-sack. Her
eyes laughed and shot forth sparks as from a smithy in the dark, but her
face was oddly pale.

Then she vanished altogether like a vision.

He was glad when he got down into his boat again, and pushed off and
rode away.

But when he got out into the sound, and slackened speed a bit, he
perceived that the ring still sat upon his finger.

His first thought was to tear it off and fling it into the sea; but then
it sat tighter than ever.

It was so curiously wrought and fretted and engraved that he must needs
examine it more curiously; and the longer he looked at it the stranger
the gold whereof it was wrought gleamed and glistened. Turn it as he
would to examine its spirals, he could never make out where they began
and where they ended.

But as he sat there and looked and looked at it, the black crackling and
sparkling eyes of that pale face stood out more and more plainly before
his eyes. He didn't exactly know whether he thought her ugly or
handsome--the uncanny creature!

The ring he now meant to keep, come what might.

And home he