Page:Tales from the Fjeld.djvu/238

216 and preached like seven parsons, and sang and chanted like seven clerks, as loud as all the parsons and clerks in the country round. The king laughed loud at him, and was forced to hold the posts in the gallery, and the princess was just going to put a smile on her lips, but all at once she got as sad and serious as ever; and so it fared no better with Paul the schoolmaster than with Peter the soldier—for you must know one was called Peter and the other Paul. So they took him and cut three red stripes out of his back, and rubbed the salt well in, and then they sent him home again.

Then the youngest was all for setting out, and his name was Taper Tom; but his brothers laughed and jeered at him, and showed him their sore backs, and his father would not give him leave, for he said how could it be of any use to him when he had no sense, for wasn't it true that he neither knew anything or could do anything? There he sat in the ingle by the chimney-corner, like a cat, and grubbed in the ashes and split fir tapers. That was why they called him "Taper Tom." But Taper Tom wouldn't give in, for he growled and grizzled so long, that they got tired of his growling, and so at last he too got leave to go to the king's grange and try his luck.

When he got to the king's grange he did not say he wished to try to make the princess laugh, but asked if he could get a place there. No, they had no place for him; but for all that Taper Tom wouldn't take an answer; they must want some one, he said, to carry wood and water for the kitchen-maid, in such a big grange as that—that was what he said; and the king thought it might very well be, for he too got tired of