Page:Stevenson - Fables (1896).djvu/35

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VII.

THE YELLOW PAINT.


IN a certain city, there lived a physician who sold yellow paint. This was of so singular a virtue that whoso was bedaubed with it from head to heel was set free from the dangers of life, and the bondage of sin, and the fear of death forever. So the physician said in his prospectus; and so said all the citizens in the city; and there was nothing more urgent in men's hearts than to be properly painted themselves, and nothing they took more delight in than to see others painted. There was in the same city a young man of a very good family but of a somewhat reckless life; who had reached the age of manhood and would have nothing to say to the paint: "To-morrow was soon enough," said he; and when the morrow came he would still put it off. So he might have continued to do until his death; only, he had a friend of