Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/535

 Rh On this the daughter said to her father: "This man shall be my husband; I will marry him!" Her father said: "He is an idiot, I am a king; do not put me to shame by marrying him!" But she said: Tis him I will marry. When he said to you that there were mares grazing there, his meaning was, 'let us cut sticks to support ourselves'; for when a man has a stick in his hand, that man is on horseback. And, again, when he spoke of carrying, his meaning was, 'You tell a story for a while, and I'll tell a story for a while.' And when he told you to go ahead and call him from the guest-house, he also said, or meant, 'Let the people of the village know that the king has arrived,' for had you arrived in silence it had not been well; someone might have suspected you to have come with evil intent, and then, if you had killed him, the disgrace would have been yours, and if you had been killed, then, too, the disgrace would have been yours."

The next morning the king gave him his daughter in marriage. Thereupon the lad said that he would now return to his home, and the king gave a hawk to his daughter as a wedding-gift. The lad took his wife and started, and brought her home to his mother. That night he slept there, and in the morning he said to his mother, "I am now going to build the king's palace for him." So he went to the king and said: "Have you got everything ready?" The king said: "All is ready." Then he said: "And I have brought the architect," and with that he let his hawk fly. The hawk soared into the air, and there stopped and hovered. Then he said to the king: "Let a man who has never committed any fault, if there be such a man, take the first brick and give it to the hawk, and then I'll build the palace." The king made a proclamation among the people: "Let the man who has never committed a fault give the first brick." But they all said that they had committed faults. Then the lad said: "Lo! thou art king of this land! Perchance thou hast never committed a fault?" The king said: "Without doubt, I, too, have