He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right PolyU has offered a wide variety of student development programme, covering entrepreneurship development, placement / internship programmes and student exchange Programmes, altogether nurturing tomorrow's leaders. hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands.

He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. "Here," he said. "Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you." Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth.

"Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney?" Shadow asked. "Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash?"

He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put it-now empty of everything except a greasy sweatband-back over his thinning scalp. "You gotta, man," he was saying. "Didn't I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. Just give me that first coin back. It didn't belong to me."

Sweeney sighed, mournfully. "When I was but a young pup," he said, "there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play seo service with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead woman's bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good days-the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now." He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. "You shouldn't trust him," he said, reproachfully.

"I don't have to trust him. I work for him."

"Do you remember how to do it?"

"What?" Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.

"The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?" He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him.

"I was drunk," said Shadow. "I don't remember."

Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, "You got a few bucks? I don't need much. Just enough for a ticket out DR REBORNof this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. Just a lousy twenty?"