"Almost six years."

"You are no longer a student, then. A scholar."

"There is no great distinction between the two."

"I suppose not," the goblin agreed, "but it means you are no shiny-faced schoolboy. You are beyond simple student pranks."

"I think I am," said Cornwall, "but I don't quite see your point…»

"The point is that Oswald saw you steal it and yet he let you go. Could he have known what you stole?"

"I would rather doubt it. I didn't know what it was myself until I saw it. I wasn't looking for it. I didn't even know that it existed. I noticed when I got the book down that there was something rather strange about the binding on the back cover. It seemed too thick. It gave beneath one's fingers, as if something might be hidden there, between the binding and the board."

"If it was so noticeable," asked the goblin, "how is it that no one else had found it? How about another chunk of cheese?"

Cornwall cut another slice of cheese and gave it to him. "I think there is an easy answer to your question. I imagine I may have been the first one in a century or more who had taken down that book."

"An obscure tome," said the goblin. 'There are many such. Would you mind telling me what it was?"

"An old traveler's tale," said Cornwall. "Written many years ago, several hundred years ago. In very ancient script. Some monk of long ago made it a thing of beauty when he copied it, with intricate and colorful initial letters and pretty conceits in the margins. But if you ask me, it was a waste of time. By and large, it is a pack of lies."

"Then why did you go looking for it?"

"Sometimes from many falsehoods one may garner certain truths. I was looking for the mention of one specific thing."

"And you found it?"

"Not in the book," said Cornwall. "In the hidden manuscript. I'm inclined to think the book is the original copy of the tale. Perhaps the only one. It is not the sort of thing that would have been copied extensively. The old monk in the scriptorium probably worked from the traveler's own writings, copying it in style, making it a splendid book that one might be rightly proud of."