"I will," agreed Gud.
And he went out and stopped the storm, and while he was out he destroyed the major portion of the local law of gravitation.
When he came back into the cottage, the moral little hen was all a-cackling and the dear little widow was all a-smiling, for behold, the hen was looking at the widow, who in her hand held the lightest cake she had ever lifted.
After he had had his cake and eaten it, too, Gud returned to the Impossible Curve, and as he reached it, Fidu came romping forth to meet him.
Chapter XVI
As Gud passed on along the way he saw a white-haired man sitting in a window of the sky and writing with a tattered goose quill pen, which he dipped into a pool of blood.
He was a sad old man with gloomy eye,
Who wrote with slow and studied inference,
Heaving the while some long and doleful sigh,
Or staring about with bored indifference.
Around his body there were ragged clothes
As hung upon a scarecrow in the corn,
And on his coat was pinned a withered rose,
From which he slowly plucked each barbed thorn.
Gud stopped upon his way and questioned him.
"I am a lonely soul," the old man said,
"Within this rose I find that life is grim,
Without its thorns, why even beauty's dead!"