"And I go down to the drinking booths, and the passion of drinking comes on me—a fury against myself and a fury against the world. And the folk do be following me to see will I let drop one gem of verse that they can tell their grandchildren they heard from the lips of Li Po. And when my heart is high with the drinking, I take a lute from a traveling poet, and not knowing what I'm saying, I compose the song. Out of fallow sorrow bloom the little songs. You mustn't be hard on an old man, wee Golden Bells, and he thinking long for his dead friends."
"Ah, poor Li Po," she said, and she had grown all soft again. "Is it so terrible to be old?"
"Now you ask me a question, Golden Bells, and I'll give you an answer. Besides, it's part of my duties to teach you wisdom. Now, it is not a terrible thing, at all, at all, to be old. I see the young folk start out in life, and before them, there's the showers of April, there's wind and heat and thunder and lightning. But I'm in warm, brown October, and all of it's gone by me. And in a little while I'll sleep, and 'tis I need it, God help me! The old don't sleep much, wee Golden Bells, so 'tis a comfort to look forward to one's rest after the hardness of the world. In a hundred or more years or five hundred, just as the fancy takes me, I'll wake up for a while and wander down the world to hear the people sing my songs, and then I'll go back to my sleep."
And she was going to ask him another question when the Sanang came up. The magician was a thick man with merry eyes and a cruel mouth.
"Golden Bells," he says, "there's rare entertainment in the crystal glass."
"What is it, Sanang!"
"The warlocks of the Gobi have a young lad down, and they're waiting until the soul comes out of his body. Come, I'll show you."
And in the crystal glass he showed her Marco Polo, and the knees going from under him in the roaring sands. She gave a quick cry of pity.
"Oh, the poor lad!"
Sanang chuckled. "He started out with a big caravan to preach what he thought was a truth to China. I've been watching him all along, and it's been rare sport. I knew it would come to this."