TWILIGHT LAND

and sputtering, and kicking and swimming, knowing no
more where he was than the man in the moon. Some-
- times his head was under water and sometimes it was up
again. :

At last, just as his strength was failing him, his feet
struck the bottom, and he crawled up on the shore more
dead than alive. Then, through fear and cold and wet,
he swooned away, and lay for a long time for all the
world as though he were dead.

Now, it chanced that two fishermen were out with their
nets that night, and Luck or Fate led them by the way
where the beggar lay on the shore. ‘Halloa!” said one
of the fishermen, ‘‘here is a poor body drowned!” They
turned him over, and then they saw what rich clothes he
wore, and felt that he had a purse in his pocket.

“Come,” said the second fisherman, ‘‘he is dead, who-
ever he is. His fine clothes and his purse of money can
do him no. good now, and we might as well have them as
anybody else.” So between them both they stripped the
beggar of all that the king had given him, and left him
lying on the beach.

At daybreak the beggar awoke from his swoon, and
there be found himself lying without a stitch to his back,
and half dead with the cold and the water he had swal-
lowed. Then, fearing lest somebody might see him, he
crawled away into the rushes that grew beside the river,
there to hide himself until night should come again.

But as he went, crawling upon hands and knees, he
suddenly came upon a bundle that had been washed up
by the water, and when he laid eyes upon it his heart
leaped within him, for what should that bundle be but the
patches and tatters which he had worn the day before,

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