Fifty-One Tales

Fifty-One Tales

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Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
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Title: Fifty-One Tales
Author: Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7838] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 21, 2003]
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FIFTY-ONE TALES

by Lord Dunsany
1915

CONTENTS
The Assignation
Charon
The Death of Pan
The Sphinx at Giza
The Hen

Wind and Fog
The Raft-Builders
The Workman
The Guest
Death and Odysseus
Death and the Orange
The Prayer of the Flower
Time and the Tradesman
The Little City
The Unpasturable Fields
The Worm and the Angel
The Songless Country
The Latest Thing
The Demagogue and the Demi-monde
The Giant Poppy
Roses
The Man With the Golden Ear-rings
The Dream of King Karna-Vootra
The Storm
A Mistaken Identity

The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise
Alone the Immortals
A Moral Little Tale
The Return of Song
Spring In Town
How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana
A Losing Game
Taking Up Picadilly
After the Fire
The City
The Food of Death
The Lonely Idol
The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)
The Reward
The Trouble in Leafy Green Street
The Mist
Furrow-Maker
Lobster Salad
The Return of the Exiles
Nature and Time

The Song of the Blackbird
The Messengers
The Three Tall Sons
Compromise
What We Have Come To
The Tomb of Pan

THE ASSIGNATION
Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid
adventurers, passed the poet by.
And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her
forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless
garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of
perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her
with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the
worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her:
"Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not
foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have
toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by."
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing
she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled
before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
"I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a
hundred years."

CHARON
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his
weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods
of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become
for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece
with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all
time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance
lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen
perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers.
They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It
was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why
these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a