Among the fragments of their meal his eye now fell upon a chicken-bone upon Gerda’s plate, the last surviving relic of their meagre Christmas dinner. It was a “wishing-bone,” from which Gerda, as they had pulled it between them, had won the right of “wishing”; and it lay there now, with the library-cover of Theodoric the Icelander just touching its forked and bare forlornness. But the sight of it sent Wolf’s mind upon a long, fantastic quest. He seemed compelled, by some hypnosis proceeding from the wishing-bone, to make a Domesday Survey of all the trivial and repulsive objects he had ever passed by. Wolf and the wishing-bone set out together, in fact, upon a pilgrimage through the limbo of the world’s rubbish-heaps.