“What!” exclaimed the stranger.  “Then you are not satisfied?”

Midas shook his head.

“And pray what would satisfy you?” asked the stranger.  “Merely for the curiosity of the thing, I should be glad to know.”

Midas paused and meditated.  He felt a presentiment that this stranger, with such a golden luster in his good-humored smile, had come hither with both the power and the purpose of gratifying his utmost wishes.  Now, therefore, was the fortunate moment when he had but to speak and obtain whatever possible or seemingly impossible thing it might come into his head to ask.

So he thought, and thought, and thought, and heaped up one golden mountain upon another in his imagination, without being able to imagine them big enough.  At last a bright idea occurred to King Midas.  It seemed really as bright as the glistening metal which he loved so much.

Raising his head, he looked the lustrous stranger in the face.

“Well, Midas,” observed his visitor, “I see that you have at length hit upon something that will satisfy you.  Tell me your wish.”

“It is only this,” replied Midas.  “I am weary of collecting my treasures with so much trouble, and beholding the heap so diminutive after I have done my best.  I wish everything that I touch to be changed to gold.”

The stranger’s smile grew so very broad that it seemed to fill the room like an outburst of the sun gleaming into a shadowy dell where the yellow autumnal leaves—­for so looked the lumps and particles of gold—­ lie strewn in the glow of light.

“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,