Elsewhere the Wishing-stone is described as giving light by night as well as by day, as far as one hundred and twenty voices could be heard calling, the one catching and repeating to another; and by this light could be seen the seven kinds of treasures falling from heaven like a rain, which are offered to all. The idea of the marvellous, luminous, enriching, health-giving stone remains, its original significance absolutely lost, and is given a new spell of life, in that it is used as a symbol of the teaching of Buddha. In Europe, also, the idea of the marvellous stone remains; it is not used allegorically, except in the Grail myth, but it haunts men’s minds; they believe in it, they suppose it must be found, and they try to manufacture it out of all kinds of ingredients.[40] Neither Arab nor European alchemist, nor Buddhist recluse, dreamed that the stone that gave light, that nourished, that rejoiced, that enriched, was the sun shining above their heads. The conception of the sun as a stone was so old, so rolled and rubbed down, that they had no notion whence it came. The idea remained, and influenced their minds strangely; but it never occurred to them to ask whence the idea was derived. There is something pitiful in looking at the wasted lives of those old seekers, bowed over their crucibles, inhaling noxious vapours, wearing out the nights in fruitless experiment; but, like all history, that of the alchemists teaches us a lesson--to look up instead of looking down--a lesson to seek happiness, wealth, contentment, in the simple and not the complex, in light instead of in darkness. I believe that this is the only one of my articles in which I have drawn a moral, but the moral is so obvious that it would have been inexcusable had I passed it over. But I know that as a child I resented the applications in _Æsop’s Fables_, and perhaps my reader will feel a like objection to having a moral appended to this essay. That I may dismiss him with a smile instead of a frown, I will close with a copy of verses extracted by me some thirty and more years ago, from--I think--a Cambridge University undergraduates’ magazine, verses probably new to my readers; but as they enforce the same moral in a perfectly fresh and charming manner, and as they deserve to be rescued from oblivion, I conclude with them: I was just five years old, that December, And a fine little promising boy, So my grandmother said, I remember, And gave me a strange-looking toy: In its shape it was lengthy and rounded, It was papered with yellow and blue, One end with a glass top was bounded, At the other, a hole to look through. ‘Dear Granny, what’s this?’ I came, crying, ‘A box for my pencils? but see, I can’t open it hard though I’m trying, O what is it? what can it be?’