. Meditate only upon the wish of thy
heart--seeing first that it is such as can wrong no man and is not
ignoble. Then will it take earthly form and draw near to thee.

"'This is the Law of That which Creates.'"

Then The Rat turned round. He had a shrewdly reasoning mind.

"That sounds as if you could get anything you wanted, if you think
about it long enough and in the right way," he said. "But perhaps it
only means that, if you do it, you'll be happy after you're dead. My
father used to shout with laughing when he was drunk and talked about
things like that and looked at his rags."

He hugged his knees for a few minutes. He was remembering the rags,
and the fog-darkened room in the slums, and the loud, hideous laughter.

"What if you want something that will harm somebody else?" he said
next. "What if you hate some one and wish you could kill him?"

"That was one of the questions my father asked that night on the ledge.
The holy man said people always asked it," Marco answered. "This was
the answer:

"'Let him who stretcheth forth his hand to draw the lightning to his
brother recall that through his own soul and body will pass the bolt.'"

"Wonder if there's anything in it?" The Rat pondered. "It'd make a
chap careful if he believed it! Revenging yourself on a man would be
like holding him against a live wire to kill him and getting all the
volts through yourself."

A sudden anxiety revealed itself in his face.

"Does your father believe it?" he asked. "Does he?"

"He knows it is true," Marco said.

"I'll own up," The Rat decided after further reflection--"I'll own up
I'm glad that there isn't any one left that I've a grudge against.
There isn't any one--now."

Then he fell again into silence and did not speak until their journey
was at an end. As they arrived early in the day, they had plenty of
time to wander about the marvelous little old city. But through the
wide streets and through the narrow ones, under the archways into the
market gardens, across the bridge and into the square where the
"glockenspiel" played its old tinkling tune, everywhere the Citadel
looked down and always The Rat walked on in his dream.

They found the hair-dresser's shop in one of the narrow streets. There
were no grand shops there, and this particular shop was a modest one.
They walked past it once, and then went back. It was a shop so humble
that there was nothing remarkable in two common boys going into it t