Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/8

 the king promised to send for the said infant. When he reached his castle they announced to him with great joy that a beautiful little daughter had that very night been born to him. It was the same night that he had seen the Three Fates. The king frowned, summoned one of his servants, and says: “Go such and such a way into the woods; in a cottage, there, lives a woodcutter; give him this money, and he will give thee a little child. This child take and afterwards drown on the way home. If thou dost not drown it, thou shalt thyself drink the brook.” The servant went, took the infant in a basket, and when he came to a plank bridge where a deep and broad river flowed, threw it, basket and all, into the water. “Good night, unwelcome son-in-law,” said the king afterwards, when the servant told him of it.

The king thought that the infant was drowned, and it was not drowned; it swam with its little basket over the water, as if the water rocked it, and slept as if the water sang to it, until it floated away to the cottage of a fisherman. The fisherman sat on the bank mending his net. Then he sees something floating down stream, jumps into his boat and away after it, and has drawn out of the water an infant in a small basket. And so he took it to his wife, and he says, “Why, thou hast always wanted a little son, and here thou hast him; the water has brought him to us.” The fisherman’s wife was glad at this, and brought up the child as her own. They called him Plavachek (Swimmerlet) because he had floated down to them over the water.

The river flows and the years flow with it, and the boy has grown up into a beautiful youth, who has not his equal far and wide. Once, in summer, it happened that thither rode on horseback the king alone, alone. It was stifling, he wanted to drink, and beckoned to the fisherman to give him’s little fresh water. When Plavachek (Swimmerlet) offered him it, the king started, looking upon him: “That’s a jolly boy, oh! fisherman,” says he. Is he thy son?” “He is, and he is not,” answered the fisherman. Just twenty years ago, he floated down stream in a small basket as a tiny little infant, and we brought him up.” Motes flickered before the king’s two eyes, and he grew as white as a sheet (lit.: as a wall). He perceived that it was the very one he had given to be drowned. But he remembered himself at once, leapt from horseback, and says: “I want to send a messenger to my royal castle, and have no one with me. Could you let this youth go there?” “Your royal highness