oment, with his twisted smile, watching the stars.

"You creep like snails," he said. "I thought you had marked my time
to-night. But not even that is given to me for nothing. I must pay for
all, it seems."

Far away, slowly scattering and receding, he heard the rustling and
bleating of his frightened flock as the robbers, running and shouting,
tried to drive them over the hills. Then he stood up and took the
shepherd's pipe from the breast of his tunic. He blew again that
plaintive, piercing air, sounding it out over the ridges and distant
thickets. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end; a melancholy,
pleading tune that searched forever after something lost.

While he played, the sheep and the goats, slipping away from their
captors by roundabout ways, hiding behind the laurel bushes, following
the dark gullies, leaping down the broken cliffs, came circling back
to him, one after another; and as they came, he interrupted his
playing, now and then, to call them by name.

When they were nearly all assembled, he went down swiftly toward the
lower valley, and they followed him, panting. At the last crook of the
path on the steep hillside a straggler came after him along the cliff.
He looked up and saw it outlined against the sky. Then he saw it leap,
and slip, and fall beyond the path into a deep cleft.

"Little fool," he said, "fortune is kind to you! You have escaped from
the big trap of life. What? You are crying for help? You are still in
the trap? Then I must go down to you, little fool, for I am a fool
too. But why I must do it, I know no more than you know."

He lowered himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found
the creature with its leg broken and bleeding. It was not a sheep but
a young goat. He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his
turban and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal. Then
he climbed back to the path and strode on at the head of his flock,
carrying the little black kid in his arms.

There were houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them
lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women
were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of
drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the
flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house
where there was no mill but many lights, came to the door and looked
out laughing, her face and bosom bare.

But the sad shepherd did