The Five Boons of Life IV

CHAPTER FOUR

"Choose yet again."  It was the fairy's voice.

Two gifts remain.  And do not despair.  In

the beginning there was but one that was precious,

and it is still here."

"Wealth--which is power!  How blind I was!"

said the man.  "Now, at last, life will be worth the

living.  I will spend, squander, dazzle.  These mock-

ers, and despisers will crawl in the dirt before me,

and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy.  I

will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of

the spirit, all contentments of the body that man

holds dear.  I will buy, buy, buy! deference, respect,

esteem, worship--every pinchbeck grace of life the

market of a trivial world can furnish forth.  I have

lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore but let

that pass:  I was ignorant then, and could but take

for best what seemed so."

Three short years went by, and a day came when

the man sat shivering in a mean garret; and he was

gaunt and wan and hollow-eyed, and clothed in rags;

and he was gnawing a dry crust and mumbling:

"Curse all the world's gifts for mockeries and

gilded lies!  And miscalled, every one.  They are

not gifts, but merely lendings.  Pleasure, Love,

Fame, Riches; they are but temporary disguises for

 lasting realities--Pain, Greed, Shame, Poverty.  The

fairy said true; in all her store there was but one gift,

How poor and cheap and mean I know those others

now to be, compared with that inestimable one, that

dear and sweet and kindly one that steeps in dream-

less and enduring sleep the pains that persecute the

body, and the shames and griefs that eat the mind

and heart.  Bring it! I am weary, I would rest."

Word of the day: pinchbeck