Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/33

 the maiden also at once rose from the table, threw off the whimple, and her golden hair rolled in rich masses from her head to the ground, and all about her was as bright as when in the morning the sunrise [lit.: the little sun] emerges, so that George’s two poor eyes quite ached again.

After this the king gave his daughter an escort for her journey, as was right and proper, and George led her to his master to be the old king’s bride. The old king’s two eyes sparkled, and he skipped about with delight when he saw Golden Locks, and he gave orders at once that preparations for the wedding should be made. “I meant, indeed, to have had thee hanged for thy disobedience, that the young ravens might feast off thee,” he says to George; ' but since thou hast served me so well, I will only have thy head cut off with an axe, and then I will have thee respectably buried.” When they had executed George, Golden Locks begged the old king to make her a present of his dead servant, and the old king could not refuse his golden-haired bride anything. After this she fastened George’s head to his body, sprinkled him with the dead water, and body and head grew together, so that not the least trace of the wound remained; then she sprinkled him with the living water, and George got up again as if he had been born anew, fresh as a stag, and with youth just beaming from his face. “Oh! how sound I have slept,” says George, and rubbed his eyes. “Ay, verily thou hast slept sound,” said Golden Locks; “and if it had not been for me, for ever and ever thou wouldst never have awoke again.” When the old king saw that George had come to life again, and that he was younger and more beautiful than before, he also would gladly have been rejuvenated in the same way. He at once ordered them to decapitate him also, and then sprinkle him with the water. They cut off his head and sprinkled and sprinkled with the living water till all the water was sprinkled away; but the head would on no conditions attach itself to the body again; only afterwards did they begin sprinkling it with the dead water, and in a moment it grew fast to the body; but the king was again dead because they had now no living water to resurrect him with. And because a kingdom without a king cannot exist, and they had no one so clever as to understand all living creatures in the way that George did, they made George king and Golden Locks queen.