“Fifty times over, my friend. Will you take it in a promissory note?”
“Ah!” he cried pleasantly. “I perceive I have sown in barren soil.”
“Again you justify yourself. Yet should I be a very thicket were all the berries I have swallowed of late to germinate in me.”
“Is that so?” said he. “But I have been a scapegoat myself——” and thereat this extraordinary person pressed upon me some food he had with him with an ample and courtly grace.
“This shall yield a better crop than my prophesying,” he said, watching me as I munched.
“Of a surety,” I answered; “the full harvest of my gratitude.”
He pondered at me.
“I wish I could convince thee,” he said.
“Wherefore? Is not the evil sufficient for the day in this distracted land? Why should one want to probe the future?”
“Because forewarned is forearmed.”