Page:Tales from the Fjeld.djvu/115

Rh there he stayed seven years. He got his food from a fruit-bearing tree which he found, and when the seven years were up, an old, old man came to him and said—

"To-day your true love is to be married. They have not got a kind word out of her these seven years, since you parted; but for all that the emperor's son wants to marry her, for that he knows she is wise and witty, and for that she is so rich."

After that the man asked if he had not a mind to be at the wedding. So he said—well! what he said any one can guess, but he saw no way of getting there. But lo! in a little while there he stood in the palace where the wedding was to be. Then he wanted to know what kind of man that was who had brought him thither. "He was no man," he said, "but a spirit." He it was whose body he had bought and buried in Turkey.

After that, he gave him a glass and a bottle, with wine in it, and told him to send some one in with a message to the cook to come out to him.

"When he comes, you must first pour out a glass and drink it yourself; and then another, and give it to the cook; and then you must pour out a third, and send it to the bride; but first of all you must take the ring off your finger, and put it into the glass which you send her."

So when the cook came in with the glass, they all cried out, "She mustn't drink." But the cook said, "First he drank, and then I drank, so she may very safely drink the wine."

And when she drank the glass out, she saw the