“There they are, my lad,” quoth the hitherto silent Adjutant. “Regard them closely, and consider them well. Familiarise yourself with them, and ponder.”
“Why?” asked Bertram.
“For in that it is likely that they, or their astral forms, will haunt your thoughts by day, your dreams by night. Your every path through life will lead to them,” answered the Adjutant.
“What have I got to do with them?” enquired Bertram, with uncomfortable visions of adding the nine big black cauldrons to his kit.
“Write about them,” was the succinct reply.
“To whom?” was the next query.
“Child,” said the Adjutant solemnly, “you are young and ignorant, though earnest. To you, in your simplicity and innocence—
‘A black cooking-pot by a cook-house door
A black cooking-pot is, and nothing more,’
as dear William Wordsworth so truly says in his Ode on the Imitations of Immorality, is it—or is it in ‘Hark how the Shylock at Heaven’s gate sings’? I forget. . . . But these are much more. Oh, very much.”
“How?” asked the puzzled but earnest one.