"'Then why, in heaven's name, need a man test any of these wickets?' cried the Foolish Prince; 'with so much to lose and, it may be, nothing to gain? For one, I shall enter none of them.'
"But once more she shook her glittering head. 'In your House and in your Sign it was decreed. Time will be, my Prince; to-day the kid gambols and the ox chews his cud. Presently the butcher cries, Time is! Comes the hour and the power, and the cook bestirs herself and says, Time was! The master has his dinner, either way, all say, and every day.'
"And the Fairy vanished as she talked with him, her radiances thinning into the neutral colors of smoke, and thence dwindling a little by a little into the vaulting spiral of a windless and a burnt-out fire, until nothing remained of her save her voice; and that was like the moving of dead leaves before they fall.
"'Truly,' said the Foolish Prince, 'I am compelled to consider this a vexatious business. For, look you, the butterfly I just now admire flits over this wicket, and then her twin flutters over that wicket, and between them there is absolutely no disparity in attraction. Hoo! here is a more sensible insect.'
"And he leaped and cracked his heels together and ran after a golden butterfly that drifted to the rearward Fields. There was such a host of butterflies about that presently he had lost track of his first choice, and was in boisterous pursuit of a second, and then of a third, and then of yet others; but none of them did he ever capture, the while that one by one he followed divers butterflies of varying colors, and never a golden butterfly did he find any more.
"When it was evening, the sky drew up the twilight from the east as a blotter draws up ink, and stars were kindling everywhere like tiny signal-fires, and a light wind came out of the murky east and rustled very plaintively in places where the more ambiguous shadows were; and the Foolish Prince shivered, for the air was growing chill, and the tips of his fingers were aware of it.
"'A crucible,' he reflected, 'possesses the minor virtue of continuous warmth.'
"And before the hedge he found a Rational Person, led hither by a Clothes' Moth, working out the problem of the hundred wickets in consonance with the most approved methods. 'I have very nearly solved it,' the Rational Person said, in genteel triumph, 'but this evening grows too dark for any further ciphering, and again I must wait until to-morrow. I regret, sir, that you have elected to waste the day, in pursuit of various meretricious Lepidoptera.'
"'A happy day, my brother, is never wasted."
"'That appears to me to be nonsense,' said the Rational Person; and he put up his portfolio, preparatory to spending another night under his umbrella in the Fields.