Fifty-One Tales | Page 8

where the wild rose blooms with a strange
abundance. There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an almost exotic
kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the Puritan flowers. Two
hundred generations ago (generations, I mean, of roses) this was a
village street; there was a floral decadence when they left their simple
life and the roses came from the wilderness to clamber round houses of
men.
Of all the memories of that little village, of all the cottages that stood
there, of all the men and women whose homes they were, nothing
remains but a more beautiful blush on the faces of the roses.
I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields
come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may
find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have
loved a little that swart old city.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN EAR-RINGS
It may be that I dreamed this. So much at least is certain--that I turned
one day from the traffic of a city, and came to its docks and saw its
slimy wharves going down green and steep into the water, and saw the
huge grey river slipping by and the lost things that went with it turning
over and over, and I thought of the nations and unpitying Time, and

saw and marvelled at the queenly ships come newly from the sea.
It was then, if I mistake not, that I saw leaning against a wall, with his
face to the ships, a man with golden ear-rings. His skin had the dark tint
of the southern men: the deep black hairs of his moustache were
whitened a little with salt; he wore a dark blue jacket such as sailors
wear, and the long boots of seafarers, but the look in his eyes was
further afield than the ships, he seemed to be beholding the farthest
things.
Even when I spoke to him he did not call home that look, but answered
me dreamily with that same fixed stare as though his thoughts were
heaving on far and lonely seas. I asked him what ship he had come by,
for there were many there. The sailing ships were there with their sails
all furled and their masts straight and still like a wintry forest; the
steamers were there, and great liners, puffing up idle smoke into the
twilight. He answered he had come by none of them. I asked him what
line he worked on, for he was clearly a sailor; I mentioned well-known
lines, but he did not know them. Then I asked him where he worked
and what he was. And he said: "I work in the Sargasso Sea, and I am
the last of the pirates, the last left alive." And I shook him by the hand I
do not know how many times. I said: "We feared you were dead. We
feared you were dead." And he answered sadly: "No. No. I have sinned
too deeply on the Spanish seas: I am not allowed to die."

THE DREAM OF KING KARNA-VOOTRA
King Karna-Vootra sitting on his throne commanding all things said: "I
very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she
was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, rolling over
and over, yet her face was unhidden and shone, being full of moonlight.
"I said to her:
"'Walk with me by the great pools in many-gardened, beautiful
Istrakhan where the lilies float that give delectable dreams; or, drawing

aside the curtain of hanging orchids, pass with me thence from the
pools by a secret path through the else impassable jungle that fills the
only way between the mountains that shut in Istrakhan. They shut it in
and look on it with joy at morning and at evening when the pools are
strange with light, till in their gladness sometimes there melts the
deadly snow that kills upon lonely heights the mountaineer. They have
valleys among them older than the wrinkles in the moon.
"'Come with me thence or linger with me there and either we shall
come to romantic lands which the men of the caravans only speak of in
song; or else we shall listlessly walk in a land so lovely that even the
butterflies that float about it when they see their images flash in the
sacred pools are terrified by their beauty, and each night we shall hear
the myriad nightingales all in one chorus sing the stars to death. Do this
and I will send heralds far from here with tidings of thy beauty; and
they shall run and come to Séndara and men shall know it there who
herd brown sheep; and from Séndara the rumour