"You shall some day be called to high and difficult tasks in
the kingdom," he said to them, "and you should prepare yourselves all
you can." Almost every day he set their minds a-thinking, how the
lives of the people could be made happier, and hardly a day passed on
which he did not say to them, that people would be happier the nearer
they got to the Golden Age. In this way the children came early to the
thought that, one way or other, happiness would come into the world
along with the Golden Age.
But always there was one thing they could not understand: that was the
time when the Golden Age should be.
About the Age itself they were entirely at one. They could not
remember a year in their lives when they were not at one in this. As
far back as the days when, in the long winter evenings, they sat
listening to the ballads and stories of their old nurse, they had been
lovers and admirers of that Age. "It was the happy Age of the world,"
the nurse used to say. "The fields were greener, the skies bluer, the
rainbows brighter than in other Ages.
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