Produced by Anne Reshnyk, Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team FIFTY-ONE TALES by Lord Dunsany 1915 CONTENTS The Assignation Charon The Death of Pan The Sphinx at Giza The Hen Wind and Fog The Raft-Builders The Workman The Guest Death and Odysseus Death and the Orange The Prayer of the Flower Time and the Tradesman The Little City The Unpasturable Fields The Worm and the Angel The Songless Country The Latest Thing The Demagogue and the Demi-monde The Giant Poppy Roses The Man With the Golden Ear-rings The Dream of King Karna-Vootra The Storm A Mistaken Identity The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise Alone the Immortals A Moral Little Tale The Return of Song Spring In Town How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana A Losing Game Taking Up Picadilly After the Fire The City The Food of Death The Lonely Idol The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts) The Reward The Trouble in Leafy Green Street The Mist Furrow-Maker Lobster Salad The Return of the Exiles Nature and Time The Song of the Blackbird The Messengers The Three Tall Sons Compromise What We Have Come To The Tomb of Pan THE ASSIGNATION Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by. And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things. And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening. And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: "Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by." And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said: "I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years." CHARON Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness. It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity. If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs. So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.