purses Honath kn6w well, not only as visitor but as artisan.
The finest of them, the inverted flowers which opened auto-
matically as the morning dew bathed them, yet which could be
closed tightly and safely around their occupants at dusk by a
single draw-string, were his own design as well as his own
handiwork. They had been widely admired and imitated.
The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to
bring him to the end of the snap-spine tether. They had given
weight to his words among othersweight enough to make
him, at last, the arch-doubter, the man who leads the young
into blasphemy, the man who questions the Book of Laws.
And they had probably helped to win him his passage on
the Elevator to Hell.
The purses were already opening as the party swung among
them. Here and there, sleepy faces biinked out from amid the
exfoliating sections, criss-crossed by relaxing lengths of dew-
soaked rawhide. Some of the awakening householders rec-
ognized Honath, of that he was sure, but none came out to
follow the partythough the villagers should be beginning
to drop from the hearts of their stitched flowers like ripe seed-
pods by this hour of any normal day.
A Judgment was at hand, and they knew itand even
those who had slept the night in one of Honath’s finest houses
would not speak for him now. Everyone knew, after all, that
Honath did not believe in the Giants.
Honath could see the Judgment Seat itself now, a slung
chair of woven cane crowned along the back with a row of
gigantic mottled orchids. These had supposedly been trans-