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It is fed by huge glaciers, which hang over the shoulders of the hills like ragged cloaks of ice. As we row along the shore, trolling in vain for the trout that live in the ice-cold water, fragments of the tattered cloth-of-silver far above us, on the opposite side, are loosened by the touch of the summer sun, and fall from the precipice.

One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, the vaporous atmosphere was palpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of an invisible musical box. The prince reclined on a couch from which a draping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor.

"Yet you begged your father for a cloth-of-silver falcon hood this morning." Prince Richard laughed and his brother stared. "Are you a witch?" asked the latter. "No, I am not a witch. I lost my way in the gardens before I found the right path. You were talking in the arbor by the edge of the lake, and you implored your father, the King, like a beggar on the street corner."

The Judge, hoary-headed now, in a robe of cloth-of-silver which rippled, had but now got home from a Pilgrimage; and the time was Simcath Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law, and the carrying of Candles, in the month.

Upon Miss Hattie Becker, who within the narrow slit had endured eight of these Augusts with only two casual faints and a swoon or two nipped in the bud, this ninth August came in so furiously that, sliding out of her sixth showing of a cloth-of-silver and blue-fox opera wrap, a shivering that amounted practically to chill took hold of her.

Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off a cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers tattooing, too, along the chair-sides. How insidiously do the years nibble in! how pussy-footed and how cocksure the crow's-feet!

Her wrap had fallen open and beneath the broad bars of her cloth-of-silver dress her bosom yet rose and fell after the exertions of her dance. A jet black curl had strayed out from beneath her lofty silver head-dress, and she thrust it back in its place with one little brown bejeweled hand whilst she extended the other to Strangwise. "Tiens, mon capitaine!" she said.

The King of Durendal wore a cloth-of-silver leotard and pink tights, and a belt of gold links on which he carried a jeweled dagger only slightly thicker than a knitting needle. He was slender and willowy, and he had large and soulful eyes, and the royal beautician must have worked on him for a couple of hours. Wait till Marris sees this; oh, brother!

For he was looking at this strangely beautiful girl with her skin showing very brown beneath a wonderful silver tiara-like headdress, and in the broad interstices of a cloth-of-silver robe with short, stiffly wired-out skirt. She was seated, an idol, on a glittering black throne, at her feet with their tapering dyed nails a fantastically attired throng of worshipers.

That left the King of Durendal to Paul; for a start, he dropped a compliment on the cloth-of-silver leotard. King Ranulf laughed dulcetly, brushed the garment with his fingertips, and said that it was just a simple thing patterned after the Durendalian peasant costume. "You have peasants on Durendal?" "Oh, dear, yes! Such quaint, charming people.