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Tales of Three Hemispheres -- Chapter 8




THE SACK OF EMERALDS
ONE BAD October night in the high wolds beyond Wiltshire, with a north wind
chaunting of winter, with the old leaves letting go their hold one by one
from branches and dropping down to decay, with a mournful sound of owls, and
in fearsome loneliness, there trudged in broken boots and in wet and windy
rags an old man, stooping low under a sack of emeralds. It were easy to see
had you been travelling late on that inauspicious night, that the burden of
the sack was far too great for the poor old man that bore it. And had yoou
flashed a lantern in his face there was a look there of hopelessness and
fatigue that would have told you it was no wish of his that kept him
tottering on under that bloated sack.
When the menacing look of the night and its cheerless sounds, and the cold,
and the weight of the sack, had all but brought him to the door of death,
and he had dropped his sack onto the road and was dragging it on behind him,
just as he felt that his final hour was come, and come (which was worse) as
he held the accursed sack, just then he saw the bulk and the black shape of
the Sign of the Lost Shepherd loom up by the ragged way. He opened the door
and staggered into the light and sank on a bench with his huge sack beside
him.
All this you had seen had you been on that lonely road, so late on those
bitter wolds, with their outlines vast and mournful in the dark, and their
little clumps of trees sad with October. But neither you nor I were out that
night. I did not see the poor old man and his sack until he sank down all of
a heap in the lighted inn.
And Yon the blacksmith was there; and the carpenter, Willie Losh; and
Jackers, the postman's son. And they gave him a glass of beer. And the old
man drank it up, still hugging his emeralds.
And at last they asked him what he had in his sack, the question he clearly
dreaded; and he only clasped yet tighter the sodden sack and mumbled he had
potatoes.
"Potatoes," said Yon the blacksmith.
"Potatoes," said Willie Losh.
And when he heard the doubt that was in their voices the old man shivered
and moaned.
"Potatoes, did you say?" said the postman's son. And they all three rose and
tried to peer at the sack that the rain-soaked wayfarer so zealously
sheltered.
And from the old man's fierceness I had said that, had it not been for that
foul night on the roads and the weight he had carried so far and the fearful
winds of October, he had fought with the blacksmith, the carpenter and the
postman's son, all three, till he beat them away from his sack. And weary
and wet as he was he fought them hard.