I laughed, half annoyed and half frightened; and then, suddenly and oddly, there came into my head the thought of the stocking needle the _gouvernante_ was wont to stick into my bosom at meals, to prevent me stooping and rounding my back. Must I confess, my Alcide, that there was ever a time when thy Diane was a little less or more than a sylph? “Make me light,” I said, “so that I can dance without feeling the ground.” She looked at me strangely a moment, then all about her in a stealthy way, while she slipped her hand into her pocket. “Hush!” she said. “For none other but you. Only tell not of it.” And she brought up a little greasy packet, of parchment writ round with characters, like a Hebrew phylactery. “Have you ever heard tell of the duck-stone?” she whispered. I shook my head, full of curiosity. “No,” she said, “nor any of thine. It fell from the sky, from another world, deary, that’s strange to ours, and the gipsies found it in the wild places of the woods. There was a smell came from it like the sugar of all flowers, and it was as light as foam and as hard as the beaten rocks.” She undid the packet while she spoke, and I saw a number of tiny grey cubes, like frothy pumice-stone, one of which she detached, and gave to me. “It wrought upon them even to madness,” she said, “so that they took and broke it with their mattocks. And, lo! the nameless thing was found in its scattered parts a virtue, even like the poisons which, taken in little, heal. Smell to it when the world is dark, and your brain shall flash into light, like an inn to the tired traveller. Smell to it when your feet go sick and heavy, and you shall feel them like the birds’ whose bones are full of wind. But tell not of the gift or giver, lest I die!” Involuntarily, as she spoke, I had raised the stone to my nostrils. A faint scent as of menthene intoxicated my brain. The downs and the sky swam before me in one luminous mist. Lightness and delight took all my soul and body with rapture.... A shout brought me to myself. I was sitting on the grass, with the duck-stone still tight in my clutch. The gipsy was gone, how long I could not tell, and up the road was coming a second cortège, more brilliant than the former. A dozen young fellows, all volunteer runners and dressed in white, preceded a coach in which sat a rich-apparelled lady, very bold and handsome, and escorted by a splendid cavalcade of gentlemen. It was the Duchess of Cumberland, who followed her husband to the seaside, as I was to learn by and by; for while I was collecting my drowsy young wits to look, a wonderful thing happened. A horseman drew up with a cry, dismounted, seized and bore me to his saddle, and rode away with me after the carriage. It was my father, flushed and jovial, the pink and Corinthian of his company, as he always was.