“The Golden Touch!” exclaimed he.  “You certainly deserve credit, friend Midas, for striking out so brilliant a conception.  But are you quite sure that this will satisfy you?”

“How could it fail?” said Midas.

“And will you never regret the possession of it?”

“What could induce me?” asked Midas.  “I ask nothing else, to render me perfectly happy.”

“Be it as you wish, then,” replied the stranger, waving his hand in token of farewell.  “To-morrow, at sunrise, you will find yourself gifted with the Golden Touch.”

The figure of the stranger then became exceedingly bright, and Midas involuntarily closed his eyes.  On opening them again, he beheld only one yellow sunbeam in the room, and, all around him, the glistening of the precious metal which he had spent his life in hoarding up.

Whether Midas slept as usual that night, the story does not say.  Asleep or awake, however, his mind was probably in the state of a child’s, to whom a beautiful new plaything has been promised in the morning.  At any rate, day had hardly peeped over the hills, when King Midas was broad awake, and, stretching his arms out of bed, began to touch the objects that were within reach.  He was anxious to prove whether the Golden Touch had really come, according to the stranger’s promise.  So he laid his finger on a chair by the bedside, and on various other things, but was grievously disappointed to perceive that they remained of exactly the same substance as before.  Indeed, he felt very much afraid that he had only dreamed about the lustrous stranger, or else that the latter had been making game of him.  And what a miserable affair would it be, if, after all his hopes, Midas must content himself with what little gold he could scrape together by ordinary means, instead of creating it by a touch!

All this while it was only the gray of the morning, with but a streak of brightness along the edge of the sky, where Midas could not see it.  He lay in a very disconsolate mood, regretting the downfall of his hopes, and kept growing sadder and sadder, until the earliest sunbeam shone through the window, and gilded the ceiling over his head.  It seemed to Midas that this bright yellow sunbeam was reflected in rather a singular way on the white covering of the bed.  Looking more closely, what was his astonishment and delight, when he found that this linen fabric had been transmuted to what seemed a woven texture of the purest and brightest gold!  The Golden Touch had come to him with the first sunbeam!

Midas started up, in a kind of joyful frenzy, and ran about the room, grasping at everything that happened to be in his way.  He seized one of the bed-posts, and it became immediately a fluted golden pillar.  He pulled aside a window-curtain, in order to admit a clear spectacle of the wonders which he was performing; and the tassel grew heavy in his hand,—­a mass of gold.  He took up a book from the table.