Alas! the longed-for hour, when at last it came, was in no wise like the picture that eager greed had held up before their minds’ eye. Bad luck still clave fast to the ill-starred merchant; or so it seemed; for when he came anear the wished-for harbour, he saw indeed amidst crowded masts a little smouldering smoke and flame, and folks running to and fro upon the quay; but his own good ship with her bales of costly merchandize, he never saw. That very night, by misadventure, some spark from the shipmen’s fire had fallen unheeded, and the ship had burned down to the edge of the cold water. Thus sore smitten, and in great heaviness, the merchant must wend home again. Poor had he left it, and poor must he return. Full well might cruel fancy now paint for him--as wearily, with down-bent head, he turned to fare back the way that he had come--the grief of such an empty home-coming. “Alas!” he sighed, as he looked round across the wide wintry plain, “unhappy that I am! I cannot even take home with me the one little white rose for Beauty.” And so, very sorrowfully, did he ride on for many a weary mile, in the rain and the wind. Lost in troubled thought, he forgot to mark which way his horse might go. On a sudden the creaking sound of thick branches overhead, with storms of dry dead leaves whirled past his face, and many a wild sound, as of the great north wind in winter battling with the strong-limbed forest-trees, aroused him and recalled him to himself. All around seemed strange, and unlike the road he knew. Painfully for a time the merchant and his tired beast made head against the driving blast. The forest path seemed as though it would never end; the wind blew as though it would never cease. But at sundown there fell a calm. The dark clouds broke, and in the clear evening light, the man turned into a way he deemed that he had gone, once in older times, under shelter of a grey stone wall. On the right hand, between straight red bolls of tall fir-trees, shone the far-off open country. The wall closed in upon the left; and above the mouldering weed-grown coping, from within, rose dark cypress spires against the sky. Arbutus trees, all a-flame with rich ripe fruit amidst gold-green leaves, tossed down their scarlet balls upon the wet stony way below. And withal, from the other side came a great sweetness as of summer roses upon the air; but a few paces farther on, white roses, like floods of surging foam, overtopped the high wall. Between the whiteness of uncounted roses scarce any green at all might show. Now as the merchant beheld these foam-white flowers, he thought on Beauty’s simple wish. Then he cast about in his mind how to reach up to them; and anon he spied a quaintly-painted gateway in the wall, and a little door set therein. Without more ado he dismounted, and pushing open the little door, passed through into a fairy garden. Within the greenness of that enchanted space there was not any more winter. Green