Margaret Sherwood

“ Women sobbed for very joy; others wrote madly on their tablets; maidens gasped with red lips slightly opened; never, during the whole lecture season, had come so big a wind from out the bags, and honest Hugh blushed with mingled shame and triumph when he saw the face of his betrothed, for it wore the look of one who had seen the white vision of naked truth.
Following the fashion of the Necromancer, he had taken a maxim, and had dressed it up so that men knew it not, and so that it came forth as revelation. ”

“ So it was not long before a tall man in drab went running through the narrow streets on the outskirts of the town, crying and wringing his hands, and the rattling bags of rose color, and purple, and gold were gone from his neck.
"Oh, my vocabulary!" he wailed. "Oh, my bags, my bags, my bags! What am I but a man undone without my bag of adjectives!" ”

“ The women who watched from lattice or stone doorstep were of those who, by means of ten skillfully selected adjectives from the rose-colored bag, and a dozen golden epithets from the bag of yellow, had been made to gape and quiver with the sense of the birth of new truth, yet they failed to recognize the juggler, for iridescent mist and ruddy vapor had vanished from his head and shoulders, and they saw naught save a lean and ugly man fleeing under a gray sky ”

“ A shadow of pain passed over the maiden's face.
"I mean not goods nor possessions, nor any manner of vulgar things; 't is of mind and soul I speak, and ours be far apart."
"My goods be not vulgar!" cried young merchant Hugh. "Rare silks and cloths from the East have I, and purest pearls, for thy white throat. No common thing is there in all my store."
Then the little foot of Blanche tapped impatiently on the stone floor.
"’T is of no avail that I try to make thee understand! I say there be depths in my nature that thou mayst not satisfy ”

“ Day after day the Necromancer stood in the market-place, and put his lips secretly to his colored bags, and spoke. He had searched all the copy-books of the kingdom, and had taken familiar truths, such as: "The good die young;" "To be selfish is to be miserable;" "Haste makes waste;" "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush;" ”

“ Life went on quietly in the city by the sea. In the gray mornings count and countess talked amicably together in their great hall, and wool-carder and his wife gossiped cheerily as they rolled and carded the white fleece ”

“ At the sign of the Red Dragon that afternoon, young merchant Hugh was closely locked in his room. Behind great iron bolts he sat upon a three-legged stool, and worked with the colored, rattling bags.
"’T is well that men have devised this thing," he said, holding a mirror before his face, as he sucked air from the bag of rose ”