I could but whistle and receive the slow, soft scrutiny of her familiar eyes.  I fancied even her bland face smiled, as might elderliness on youth.  She climbed near with bridle broken and trailing, thrust out her nose to me, and so was mine again.

Sunlight left the woods.  Wind passed through the upper branches.  So, with rain in the air, I went forward once more; not quite so headily, perhaps, yet, I hope, with undiminished courage, like all earth’s travellers before me, who have deemed truth potent as modesty, and themselves worth scanning print after.

IX

    A ... shop of rarities.

    —­GEORGE HERBERT.

A little before darkness fell we struck into a narrow road traversing the wood.  This, though apparently not much frequented, would at least lead me into lands inhabited, so turning my face to the West, that I might have light to survey as long as any gleamed in the sky, I trudged on.  But I went slow enough:  Rosinante was lame; I like a stranger to my body, it was so bruised and tumbled.

The night was black, and a thin rain falling when at last I emerged from the interminable maze of lanes into which the wood-road had led me.  And glad I was to descry what seemed by the many lights shining from its windows to be a populous village.  A gay village also, for song came wafted on the night air, rustic and convivial.

Hereabouts I overtook a figure on foot, who, when I addressed him, turned on me as sharply as if he supposed the elms above him were thick with robbers, or that mine was a voice out of the unearthly hailing him.

I asked him the name of the village we were approaching.  With small dark eyes searching my face in the black shadow of night, he answered in a voice so strange and guttural that I failed to understand a word.  He shook his fingers in the air; pointed with the cudgel he carried under his arm now to the gloom behind us, now to the homely galaxy before us, and gabbled on so fast and so earnestly that I began to suppose he was a little crazed.

One word, however, I caught at last from all this jargon, and that often repeated with a little bow to me, and an uneasy smile on his white face—­“Mishrush, Mishrush!” But whether by this he meant to convey to me his habitual mood, or his own name, I did not learn till afterwards.  I stopped in the heavy road and raised my hand.

“An inn,” I cried in his ear, “I want lodging, supper—­a tavern, an inn!” as if addressing a child or a natural.

He began gesticulating again, evidently vain of having fully understood me.  Indeed, he twisted his little head upon his shoulders to observe Rosinante gauntly labouring on. “’Ame!—­’ame!” he cried with a great effort.

I nodded.

“Ah!” he cried piteously.

He led me, after a few minutes’ journey, into the cobbled yard of a bright-painted inn, on whose signboard a rising sun glimmered faintly gold, and these letters standing close above it—­“The World’s End.”