“I’d have killed them,” his son declared firmly. “Every one. I’d have told them to stop, and then, if they wouldn’t, I’d have killed them. Thrown them in the river—or hammered them with stones till they died. That’s what I’d have done.” “No,” Theodore told him, “you wouldn’t have killed them.... One of them said the same thing to me—one of the wicked ones. He said we should have stamped out the race of them. Afterwards I knew he was right, but at the time I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. I heard what he said, but the words had no real meaning for me.” He saw something that was almost contempt in his son’s eyes and took the grubby face between his hands. “That same wicked man—who was also very wise—told me something else that is as true for you as it was for me; he said that we never know anything except through our own experience. I might tell you that the sun is warm or the water is cold, but if you had never felt the heat of the sun or the cold of the water you would not know what I meant. And it was like that with us; there were always some few who understood that knowledge was a flame that, in the end, would burn us—but the rest of us couldn’t even try to save ourselves until after we were burned.” He stroked the grubby face as he released it. “That’s the Law, son; and all that matters you’ll learn that way. That way and no other—just as we did.” * * * * * In time he found himself recalling, with strange interest, the fairy-tales of his childhood; he spent long hours re-weaving and piecing them together, searching his memory for half-remembered fragments of what had once seemed fantasy or nonsense invented for the nursery. The hobgoblins and heroes of his nursery days were transformed and made suddenly possible; looking through the mind of a new generation, he saw that they might have been as human and prosaic as himself. More—he came to know that he and his commonplace, civilized contemporaries would be the heroes and hobgoblins of the future.