Page:Crane Italian Popular Tales.djvu/72

34 took the egg, struck it on the fairy's forehead, and she fell down dead. When the youth saw that she was really dead, he entered a carriage with the king's daughter and drove to the palace. When the king and queen saw their daughter again, they wept for joy, and married her to her deliverer. The wedding took place with great magnificence, and there were great festivities and rejoicings in the city.

A few days after, the husband looked out of the window and saw at the end of the street a dense fog; he said to his wife: "I will go and see what that fog is." So he dressed for the chase and went away with his dog and horse. After he had passed through the mist, he saw a mountain on which were two beautiful ladies. They came to meet him, and invited him to their palace. He accepted and they showed him into a room, and one of the ladies asked: "Would you like to play a game of chess?" "Very well," he answered, and began to play and lost. Then they took him into a garden where there were many marble statues, and turned him into one, together with his dog and horse. These ladies were sisters of the fairy, and this was the way they avenged her death.

Meanwhile the princess waited and her husband did not return. One morning the father and brothers of the youth found the kitchen full of blood, which dropped from the fish-bone. "Something has happened to him," they said, and the second brother started in search of him with another one of the dogs and horses. He passed by the palace of the princess, who was at the window, and those brothers looked so much alike that when she saw him she thought it was her husband and called him. He entered and she spoke to him of the fog, but he did not understand her; he let her talk on, however, imagining that his brother was mixed up in that affair. The next morning he arose and went to see the fog with his dog and horse. He passed through the fog, found the mountain and the two ladies, and, to make the story short, the same thing happened to him that happened to his brother, and he became stone. And the queen waited, and in the father's kitchen the bone dropped blood faster than ever.