The pastry cook, when I found him, proved to have the saddest face of all, and his wife looked as if she had been weeping; and there were on the pastry cook’s housetop no less than five small storks. When I mentioned that I wanted a custard pie for a seal, the pastry cook handed over the pie to me without any appearance of surprise, and without accepting any payment. I hurried back to the beach, and sat down before the seal and held the custard pie while the hungry creature ate it. “Did you ever eat raw fish?” said he. “I should say not,” said I. “It’s awful,” said the seal. “It’s positively petrifying. You know I wasn’t always a seal. Custard pie always used to do me more good than anything else.” “Tell me who you are,” said I, “and who the Ragpicker is.” “There’s no time now,” said the seal. “You’d better be going. The people here would like to kill the Ragpicker if they could, but they’re afraid of the shadows; she’s afraid of the people, and the people are afraid of the shadows; and she’s more afraid of the One-Armed Sorcerer than anybody else, though between you and me I think she’s wrong about it, because he seems to be a pretty decent sort of old chap, and I rather believe he’d like to help her if she wasn’t afraid of him; but of course you can’t help a person who’s afraid of you. All mixed up, isn’t it?” “I don’t understand a word of it,” said I. “Brave people are always stupid,” said the seal, and with this he wriggled himself off into the water, and I saw his head going back and forth slowly from side to side across the cove. I turned and went into the village. It was now nearly dark. As I came toward the pastry cook’s shop again, the village cryer came walking down the street, ringing a bell, and calling out, over and over again, “Seven o’clock, and time for supper! Seven o’clock, and time for supper!” As the cryer passed by, the storks flapped their wings and flew down from the housetops, and took their stand in a row before their houses, along the curbs; and wherever a stork stood before a house a woman came out with a bowl in her hand. When I reached the pastry cook’s shop, the pastry cook’s wife was kneeling on the sidewalk before the five little storks, feeding them gruel out of a bowl with a long spoon. I observed that all along the street women were feeding the storks in the same way; but again I noticed that there were no children. I walked on, watching in every street the feeding of the storks, and looking out for some sign of the Princess. I observed at last a gilded wooden arm and hand holding a lantern, projecting from the front wall of a house a little in advance; and before this house, at the curb, a single stork was standing, and an old man, one-armed, wearing white hair and beard and dressed in a blue gown with silver stars, was sitting before the stork, feeding it with a long spoon from a bowl in his lap. Around the stork’s neck hung a pearl necklace.