"I didn't know there was so much money in all the world."
For they shamed the very sun, those gleaming coins, some inscribed with queer old queens' heads, others with crowns or the profiles of old, forgotten Kings, some newly-minted, and others worn with centuries of travel up and down the highway of ancient empires and in great galleons on the seas.
They had jingled in the pockets of gay caballeros in sunny Madrid; accompanied the muleteers bells on the heights of the Pyrenees; rung on the counters of shops in Londontown when women wore headdresses like cornucopias, girdles and sweeping trains. They had been fought for by musketeers when Richelieu was more than King, and in garrets in the shadow of Notre Dame, caressed by shrivelled misers' hands. To turbaned Turks they had been carried in ransom, and stolen by bandits in doublets of green from rubicund monks on ambling palfreys.
Coveted, caressed, cursed, lied for, fought for, bled for—the shining cause of all the sins of the decalogue, at last they were wrested by buccaneers with dripping swords yet shouting hoarse Te Deums—from the holds of shattered ships—when the New World was really new.
And now that it was old, to lie at the feet of a modern young maiden who had never had even a gold eagle to spend on pretty things!
The sun, now high over head, shot down his flaming arrows, transforming into living rainbows the clusters of gems between the crevices of the golden piles—emeralds as green as the deep sea when it takes that hue; sapphires as blue as the sea when it changes again; diamonds like minia-
