"All has been purchased with heaviness of heart, with the ready money of pains and labours, and services rendered by me. For example, to one King I pointed out the means by which he was able to repossess himself of the Apples of Youth; to another, I showed the secret of re-opening the spring whence flows the water which gives health and life."
"Apples of Youth! Water of Life!" interrupted the King, addressing Plavacete. "I will go in search of those treasures myself! What happiness! After eating one of those rejuvenating apples, I shall return restored to youth! Then I will drink a few drops of the water of immortality—and I shall live for ever!"
Without delaying a moment, the King set off in search of those two objects—and down to the present day has never been heard of again.
[The Queer Side of Things.]
MR. HAY.
I have the most severe misgiving about a crucial point of this story; it involves an announcement which may cause the modern reader to throw aside the narrative as a preposterous absurdity. Ah! if I only had to deal with the reader of the Dark Ages, who would swallow anything! Absolute fear incites me to keep this announcement to myself until nearing the end of the tale, and then to break the awkward fact very gently—glossing it over as much as possible; but native outspokenness, assisted by the fact that such a course would spoil the story, persuades me to make the risky announcement at once, and chance the consequences.
Very well, then—Andrew P. Hay was a Centaur—a Centaur. He had descended from the pure blood of the old Greek Centaurs. The race, when the belief in the Greek mythology had waned before the spreading light of Christianity, finding the fact of its existence no longer accepted with the old unquestioning faith, and too proud to longer impose its presence on a society sceptical of its reality, retired to a remote island to carry on its existence unseen by mankind; and there its successive generations had appeared and died, until—a few years before the present date—the last survivor paced, with downcast hoof,[2] the deserted paddocks of his sires.[3]