Once again hundreds and hundreds of years went by, as they always do if you wait a while. Every animal that had known the poor fox had been dead a long time, and those that came after them told this tale as I have told it to you, only they weren’t quite certain it was true, and some of the young beasts said it was nothing but a fairy story. But one day a pearl fisher came up the river in his little boat, and while he was diving down in the deepest part of the water he found a queer-looking object sticking up in the mud, and when he had brought it ashore and washed and scrubbed it, he found it was a tail of pure gold. Hardly believing his good fortune, he took it away with him, and many wise men looked at it through spectacles and microscopes, and weighed it and thumped it and tasted it and wrote long papers about it filled with so many big words that no one ever read them. And to-day you may see this very same tail, looking rather old and rusty, in one of the museums of a foreign city, and beside it is a card telling that this is undoubtedly the golden feather that the great King No-Thing-Fan of Japan once wore in his crown, which shows that even very wise people sometimes make mistakes. But it was the fairy godmother to the poor pearl diver, who sold it for so much money that he was able to buy a cozy little bamboo cottage for his family and to ever after give them as much as they wanted to eat, and so one of the tails of the fox did some good in the world after all. THE END. TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fox That Wanted Nine Golden Tails, by Kathleen Gray Nelson