Once, a man bent over with age dragged himself by his stick from house to house, begging for shelter for the night. Everyone rejected his plea. "We don't have room for you," they said, or, "You smell weird," or, "What are you talking about? You're that wizard who lives in the tower out that way." No matter how many times he told them he wasn't, they still turned him away.
In the end he came to the house of a humble sign painter who gave him a space on the floor and half his supper, which was "too much for me anyway." The next day, when the old man made to leave, he straightened and summoned his customary attire emblazoned with arcane symbols.
"Humble sign painter! I am in fact the wizard who lives in that tower over there! Because you are the only hospitable man in this town, I leave you this gift. It is a bow with the wondrous quality that it supplies its own arrows. Behold."
The sign painter watched the wizard stretch the string whereupon an arrow appeared, already nocked. "Amazing! But I only have one arm. I cannot draw it."
"So what? It's not as if you would have gotten any use out of it anyway. What did you think I wanted you to do, shoot paint arrows? Sell this as a novelty to a rich collector of curiosities, you dunderhead. 'I cannot draw it.' Come on."
And the sign painter did just that. The money enabled him to retire, though he did not. He liked the work.
Finis
No comments:
Post a Comment