BY a roadside, at the end of a village, beneath the effigy of a god, sat a lean, brown old man. He had no covering for his head and the skin of the soles of his feet was thickened and scarred. In front of him were two little boxes, and on his knees there lay open a great book from which he was reading aloud in an unknown tongue.
From the village there came a young man, richly clad and gay, attended by two slaves. He saluted the effigy of the god and asked the old man what he might be reading. The old man replied that it was the oldest book in the world and the truest, and when he was questioned about the boxes he said that one of them contained riches and the other power. The young man looked into them and saw nothing. He laughed and spoke to one of his slaves, saying the old and the poor must have their fancies since there was nothing else for them, and, upon his orders, the slave filled the boxes with rice, and at once there sprung up two mighty trees. The slaves fled howling and the young man abased himself before the effigy of the god and stole away on his knees, praying. The old man raised his hands in thanksgiving for the shade of the trees, lifted them out of the boxes, and once more arranged them before him.
In the wood hard by arose the sound of high words and out upon the road, brawling and storming, tumbled two youths, comely and tall and strong. They stopped before the old man and appealed to him.
“Our father,” said he who first found breath, “is a poor man of this village, and I am Peter and my brother is Simon. Two days ago, on a journey, we saw the picture of the loveliest maiden in the world. We do not know her name, but we are both determined to marry her, and there is no other desire left in us. We have fought and wrestled and swum for her, but can reach no conclusion. I will not yield and he will not yield. Is all our life to be spent in wrangling?”
The old man closed his book and replied:
“The loveliest maiden in the world is Elizabeth, daughter of the greatest of emperors. If you are the sons of poor men how can you ever hope to lift eyes to her? Look now into these boxes and you shall be raised to a height by which you shall see the Emperor’s daughter and not be hidden in the dust of her chariot.”
They looked into the boxes, and Simon saw in the one a piece of gold, but Peter looked as well into the other, and in it he saw the face of his beloved princess and had no thought of all else. Simon asked for the first box and Peter for the second, and they received them and went their ways, Simon to the village and Peter out into the world, each gazing fascinated into his box.
“To him who desireth little, little is given,” said the old man. “And to him who desireth much, much is given; but to neither according to the letter of his desire.”
By the time he reached his village Simon had five gold pieces in his pocket, and as soon as he took one piece from the box another came in its place. He lent money to every one in the village at a large rate of interest and was soon the master of it. There began to be talk of him in the town ten leagues away and there came men to ask him for money. He moved to the town and built himself a big house, and it was not long before he began to look to the capital of the country.
When he moved to the capital he had six houses in different parts of the country, racehorses, picture galleries, mines, factories, newspapers, and he headed the list of subscribers to the hospitals patronized by the Royal Family. At first, in the great city, he was diffident and shy among the illustrious personages with whom he fraternized, but it was not long before he discovered that they were just as susceptible to the pinch of money as the carpenter and the priest and the bailiff and the fruiterer in his village. It was quite easy to buy the control of these important people without their ever having to face the unpleasant fact. More than one beautiful lady, among them a duchess and a prima donna of surpassing loveliness, endeavored to cajole him and to discover his secret. In vain; he could not forget the Princess Elizabeth, and now ambition spurred him on. He was wearying of the ease with which fame and position and the highest society could be bought, and began to lust for power. With his native peasant shrewdness he saw that society consisted of the People, of persons of talent and cunning above them, of the descendants of persons of talent and cunning left high and dry beyond the reach of want, of ornamental families set at the head of the nations, of a few ingenious minds who (so far as there was any direction) governed the workings and interlockings of all the parts of the whole. They had control of all the sources of money except his box, and he determined, to relieve his boredom and also as a means of reaching his Princess, to pit his power against theirs.