The Wonder Clock: Four and Twenty Marvellous Tales, Being One for Each Hour of the Day
9781465649089
313 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There was a king travelling through the country, and he and those with him were so far away from home that darkness caught them by the heels, and they had to stop at a stone mill for the night, because there was no other place handy. While they sat at supper, they heard a sound in the next room, and it was a baby crying. The miller stood in the corner, back of the stove, with his hat in his hand. “What is that noise?” said the king to him. “Oh! it is nothing but another baby that the good storks have brought into the house to-day,” said the miller. Now there was a wise man travelling along with the king, who could read the stars and everything that they told as easily as one can read one’s A B C’s in a book after one knows them, and the king, for a bit of a jest, would have him find out what the stars had to foretell of the miller’s baby. So the wise man went out and took a peep up in the sky, and by and by he came in again. “Well,” said the king, “and what did the stars tell you?” “The stars tell me,” said the wise man, “that you shall have a daughter, and that the miller’s baby, in the room yonder, shall marry her when they are old enough to think of such things.” “What!” said the king, “and is a miller’s baby to marry the princess that is to come! We will see about that.” So the next day he took the miller aside and talked and bargained, and bargained and talked, until the upshot of the matter was that the miller was paid two hundred dollars, and the king rode off with the baby. As soon as he came home to the castle he called his chief forester to him. “Here,” says he, “take this baby and do thus and so with it, and when you have killed it bring its heart to me, that I may know that you have really done as you have been told.” So off marched the forester with the baby; but on his way he stopped at home, and there was his good wife working about the house. “Well, Henry,” said she, “what do you do with the baby?” “Oh!” said he, “I am just taking it off to the forest to do thus and so with it.” “Come,” said she, “it would be a pity to harm the little innocent, and to have its blood on your hands. Yonder hangs the rabbit that you shot this morning, and its heart will please the king just as well as the other.” Thus the wife talked, and the end of the business was that she and the man smeared a basket all over with pitch and set the baby adrift in it on the river, and the king was just as well satisfied with the rabbit’s heart as he would have been with the baby’s. But the basket with the baby in it drifted on and on down the river, until it lodged at last among the high reeds that stood along the bank. By and by there came a great she-bear to the water to drink, and there she found it. Now the huntsmen in the forest had robbed the she-bear of her cubs, so that her heart yearned over the little baby, and she carried it home with her to fill the place of her own young ones. There the baby throve until he grew to a great strong lad, and as he had fed upon nothing but bear’s milk for all that time, he was ten times stronger than the strongest man in the land. One day, as he was walking through the forest, he came across a woodman chopping the trees into billets of wood, and that was the first time he had ever seen a body like himself. Back he went to the bear as fast as he could travel, and told her what he had seen. “That,” said the bear, “is the most wicked and most cruel of all the beasts.”
