to bow the knee before snivelling little thieves.”  A deputation which had come to him proposing that the well should be managed by a constitutional committee of the citizens was flogged by the guards across the drawbridge.  The leader of this deputation was a deformed tailor, who soon after planned an audacious attack on the mansion of the Keeper of the Key.  The Keeper, his guards, servants and retainers were all one night secretly drugged and for several hours of the night lay unconscious in the mansion.  Into it swarmed the little tailor and his constitutional committee; they pulled the whole interior to pieces in search of the key.  The very pillows under the head of the Keeper had been stabbed and ransacked.  It was nearing daybreak when the Keeper awoke, groggy from the effects of the narcotic.  The guard was roused.  The whole place was in confusion.  The robbers had fled, leaving the great golden knocker on the door hanging from its position; they were removing it when surprised.  The nymphs were untouched.  The voice of the Keeper of the Key was deliberate, authoritative, commanding, amid the confusion.  The legs of the guards quaked beneath them, their heads swam, and they said to each other, “Now surely is the key gone!” But their master hurried them to their morning duty, and they escorted him to the well a little beyond daybreak, and, lo, at the psychological moment, there was the key and back rolled the lid from the precious well.  “Surely,” they said, “this man is blessed, for the key comes to him as a gift from Heaven.  The robbers of the earth are powerless against him.”  When the citizens of the Seven Sisters heard of what had taken place in the evil hours of the night they poured across the drawbridge from the town and acclaimed the Keeper of the Key before his mansion.  He came out on the watch tower, his daughter by his side, and with dignified mien acknowledged the acclamations of the citizens.  And before he put the lid on the well that night the deformed tailor and his pards were all dragged through the streets of the Seven Sisters and cast into prison.

Never was the popularity of the Keeper at so high a level as after this episode.  They would have declared him the most perfect as the most powerful of men were it not for one little spot on the bright sun of his fame.  They did not like his domestic habits.  The daughter who stood by his side on the watch tower was a young girl of charm, a fair, frail maiden, a slender lily under the towering shadow of her dark father.  The citizens did not, perhaps, understand his instincts of paternity; and, indeed, if they understood them they would not have given them the sanction of their approval.  The people only saw that the young girl, his only child, was condemned to what they called a life of virtual imprisonment in the mansion.  She was a warm-blooded young creature, and like all warm-blooded creatures, inclined to gaiety of spirits, to impulsive friendships to a joyous and