To his surprise, two old men, with long, white beards, were sitting inside playing chess, as quietly as mice, with their eyes fixed on the chessboard.
Wang Chih knew something of chess, and he stepped in and watched them for a few minutes.
"As soon as they look up I can ask them if I may chop down a tree," he said to himself. But they did not look up, and by and by Wang Chih got so interested in the game that he put down his axe, and sat on the floor to watch it better.
The two old men sat cross-legged on the ground, and the chessboard rested on a slab, like a stone table, between them.
On one corner of the slab lay a heap of small brown objects which Wang Chih took at first to be date stones; but after a time the chess-players ate one each, and put one in Wang Chih's mouth, and he found it was not a date stone at all.
It was a delicious kind of sweetmeat, the like of which he had never tasted before; and the strangest thing about it was that it took his hunger and thirst away.
