Helpless grief made every face rigid. I looked again at the eldest daughter. The moving shadows embroidered on her breast intricate symbols of the fair years, passing by in the ghost of tapestry, things that happened in the beginning of the world. Let the epic tell that when the stranger slept there was a magic loom by his bed that wove that history again in valiant colors, showing battles without number, and sieges, and interminable sunny love-tales, and lotus-handed ladies whispering over manuscript things too fine to be told, and ruddy warriors sitting at watch-fires on battlements eternal; and let the epic tell how, in the early dawn, the stranger half awoke, yet saw this tapestry hung round the walls. If one could remember every story for which the pictures stood, he might indeed write the world’s unwritten epic. The last tapestry to be hung changed from gold to black warp and woof upon which was written that because of a treacherous prime minister who served a poisoned wine, the Empress of the White Witches was perishing before her time, and the young wizard, with the counter-spell, was riding night and day, but all the palace knew he would arrive too late. At breakfast the faces were stolid and white as frost. The father answered me only when I said good-by. He said he hardly knew whether I had had anything to eat, or whether any one had been good to me. “You just had to take care of yourself.” The son, feeling the demand of hospitality in his father’s voice, walked to the road with me. He asked if I was walking to Asheville. “Yes, by way of Mount Toxaway and Brevard.” He told me it was good walking all the way, and added, in a difficult burst of confidence, “I am going to Asheville.” “Why not come along with me?” I asked. I meant it heartily. He said he had to take horseback, and then the railway. He had to be there to-morrow. “What’s the hurry?” “I have to witness in a whisky case, an internal revenue case.” He said it like a Spanish Protestant called before the inquisition. * * * * * I said to my soul: “These were the revelations of a night and a morning. What deeper troubles were in the House of the Loom that you did not know?” All through the country there had been that night what is called a black frost. By the roadside it was deep and white as the wool on a sheep. But it left things blighted and black, and destroyed the chances of the fruit-bearing trees. All the way to Mount Toxaway I met scattered mourners of the ill-timed visitation. But the simple folly of spring was in me, and the strange elation of gratitude. My soul said within itself: “A money-claim has definite limits, but when will you ever discharge your obligation to the proud and the fine in the House of the Loom? You intruded on their grief. Yet they held their guest sacred as their grief.” PHIDIAS