Free The Crock of Gold by James Stephens

triumphant life!
    After a time he felt hungry, and thrusting his hand into his wallet he broke off a piece of one of his cakes and looked about for a place where he might happily eat it. By the side of the road
there was a well; just a little corner filled with water. Over it was a rough stone coping, and around, hugging it on three sides almost from sight, were thick, quiet bushes. He would not have
noticed the well at all but for a thin stream, the breadth of two hands, which tiptoed away from it through a field. By this well he sat down and scooped the water in his hand and it tasted
good.
    He was eating his cake when a sound touched his ear from some distance, and shortly a woman came down the path carrying a vessel in her hand to draw water. She was a big, comely woman, and she
walked as one who had no misfortunes and no misgivings. When she saw the Philosopher sitting by the well she halted a moment in surprise and then came forward with a good-humoured smile.
    "Good morrow to you, sir," said she.
    "Good morrow to you too, ma'am," replied the Philosopher. "Sit down beside me here and eat some of my cake."
    "Why wouldn't I, indeed?" said the woman, and she did sit beside him.
    The Philosopher cracked a large piece off his cake and gave it to her and she ate some.
    "There's a taste on that cake," said she. "Who made it?"
    "My wife did," he replied.
    "Well, now!" said she, looking at him. "Do you know, you don't look a bit like a married man."
    "No?" said the Philosopher.
    "Not a bit. A married man looks comfortable and settled: he looks finished, if you understand me, and a bachelor looks unsettled and funny, and he always wants to be running round seeing things.
I'd know a married man from a bachelor any day."
    "How would you know that?" said the Philosopher.
    "Easily," said she, with a nod. "It's the way they look at a woman. A married man looks at you quietly as if he knew all about you. There isn't any strangeness about him with a woman at all; but
a bachelor man looks at you very sharp and looks away and then looks back again, the way you'd know he was thinking about you and didn't know what you were thinking about him; and so they are
always strange, and that's why women like them."
    "Why!" said the Philosopher, astonished, "do women like bachelors better than married men?"
    "Of course they do," she replied heartily. "They wouldn't look at the side of the road a married man was on if there was a bachelor man on the other side."
    "This," said the Philosopher earnestly, "is very interesting."
    "And the queer thing is," she continued, "that when I came up the road and saw you I said to myself 'it's a bachelor man.' How long have you been married, now?"
    "I don't know," said the Philosopher. "Maybe it's ten years."
    "And how many children would you have, mister?"
    "Two," he replied, and then corrected himself, "no, I have only one."
    "Is the other one dead?"
    "I never had more than one."
    "Ten years married and only one child," said she. "Why, man dear, you're not a married man. What were you doing at all, at all! I wouldn't like to be telling you the children I have living and
dead. But what I say is that married or not you're a bachelor man. I knew it the minute I looked at you. What sort of a woman is herself?"
    "She's a thin sort of woman," said the Philosopher, biting into his cake.
    "Is she now?"
    "And," the Philosopher continued, "the reason I talked to you is because you are a fat woman."
    "I am not fat," was her angry response.
    "You are fat," insisted the Philosopher, "and that's the reason I like you."
    "Oh, if you mean it that way . . ." she chuckled.
    "I think," he continued, looking at her admiringly, "that women ought to be fat."
    "Tell you the truth," said she eagerly, "I think that myself. I never met a thin woman but she was a sour one, and I never met a fat man but he was a fool. Fat women and thin men; it's nature,"
said she.
    "It is," said he, and he leaned forward and kissed her eye.
    "Oh,