“Yes, my father,” said the young man. “I will hear that wonderful story. Perchance it may help me to inscribe my page in the book.”
His father took the hands of the young man within his own.
“It happened, O Achilles,” said his father, “that I was sitting in this little room one bitterly inclement winter’s night, in which the rain and sleet came down in a flood, and I was reading that page in the book wherein it says we are to cherish the weak, when I heard a faint knocking upon the shutters of the shop. It was a very late hour, yet I went forth to open the door; and a poor ragged woman, all bedraggled and unkempt, and with great eyes haunted by fear, flung herself upon my kindness, crying that she was faint with hunger and that she had not known food and security all that day.
“I allowed her to enter the shop; but in a moment of unwariness, in the excitement that her strange coming had provoked in my veins, I turned and entered this little room to procure a box of matches to obtain a light, never dreaming that so poor a creature would have the temerity to follow upon my steps. But as I took the box of matches off the chimney-piece where, as you know, they are always kept, and as I turned again, I beheld to my horror and consternation that the poor creature had entered the room.
“There was only one thing then that I could do, Achilles; it was to permit her to sit and eat and learn the warmth of this little hearth. And no sooner had she done this than she fell asleep, and leaned her youthful head upon this little table, which for so many years has supported the burden of the mighty book. And as she lay there, Achilles, sleeping the grateful sleep of weariness, her breathing presence appeared to expand the walls of this small apartment, and as I looked again into the book, full many a page which previously had had no purport, gave up its secret to my bewildered eyes.
“It was not until it was broad noon that the poor creature awoke, and she said in almost the voice of a small child, ‘I like this little room of yours; it is a sweet and pleasant room; I think I will stay in it for ever.’
“‘This room can have only one occupant,’ I said to the woman.
“‘It is so nice,’ she said, speaking in the strange tongue which you have heard in the streets of the great city, ‘it is so nice.’ Yet she shivered so dismally that I was driven again to the Book.
“And from one of the pages that had been newly revealed to me, I saw that he who would write in the book must first continue the dynasty; and he who would continue the dynasty must not live to himself.
“Now, Achilles, already the passion had been long in my veins to write in the book of my fathers, where all the primal wisdom of the ages had been garnered; and as it was revealed suddenly to my gaze in what manner I must equip myself for the task, I let the woman stay.