The Crock of Gold | Page 3

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The Crock of Gold
by James Stephens

CONTENTS
BOOK I THE COMING OF PAN BOOK II THE PHILOSOPHER'S
JOURNEY BOOK III THE TWO GODS BOOK IV THE
PHILOSOPHER'S RETURN BOOK V THE POLICEMEN BOOK VI
THE THIN WOMAN'S JOURNEY AND THE HAPPY MARCH

CHAPTER I
IN the centre of the pine wood called Coilla Doraca there lived not long
ago two Philosophers. They were wiser than anything else in the world
except the Salmon who lies in the pool of Glyn Cagny into which the
nuts of knowledge fall from the hazel bush on its bank. He, of course,
is the most profound of living creatures, but the two Philosophers are
next to him in wisdom. Their faces looked as though they were made of
parchment, there was ink under their nails, and every difficulty that was
submitted to them, even by women, they were able to instantly resolve.
The Grey Woman of Dun Gortin and the Thin Woman of Inis Magrath

asked them the three questions which nobody had ever been able to an-
swer, and they were able to answer them. That was how they obtained
the enmity of these two women which is more valuable than the
friendship of angels. The Grey Woman and the Thin Woman were so
incensed at being answered that they married the two Philosophers in
order to be able to pinch them in bed, but the skins of the Philosophers
were so thick that they did not know they were being pinched. They
repaid the fury of the women with such tender affection that these
vicious crea- tures almost expired of chagrin, and once, in a very ec-
stacy of exasperation, after having been kissed by their husbands, they
uttered the fourteen hundred maledic- tions which comprised their
wisdom, and these were learned by the Philosophers who thus became
even wiser than before.
In due process of time two children were born of these marriages. They
were born on the same day and in the same hour, and they were only
different in this, that one of them was a boy and the other one was a girl.
No- body was able to tell how this had happened, and, for the first time
in their lives, the Philosophers were forced to admire an event which
they had been unable to prog- nosticate; but having proved by many
different methods that the children were really children, that what must
be must be, that a fact cannot be controverted, and that what has
happened once may happen twice, they described the occurrence as
extraordinary but not unnatural, and submitted peacefully to a
Providence even wiser than they were.
The Philosopher who had the boy was very pleased because, he said,
there were too many women in the world, and the Philosopher who had
the girl was very pleased also because, he said, you cannot have too
much of a good thing: the Grey Woman and the Thin Woman, however,
were not in the least softened by maternity-- they said that they had not
bargained for it, that the children were gotten under false presences,
that they were respectable married women, and that, as a protest against
their wrongs, they would not cook any more food for the Philosophers.
This was pleasant news for their husbands, who disliked the women's
cooking very much, but they did not say so, for the women would
certainly have insisted on their rights to cook had they imagined their

husbands disliked the results: therefore, the Philos- ophers besought
their wives every day to cook one of their lovely dinners again, and this
the women always refused to do.
They all lived together in a small house in the very centre of a