Page:The Green Fairy Book (1902).djvu/205

 wedding breakfast bread without salt, and meat without seasoning.

Seeing him make faces, and eat very little, his daughter, who sat beside him, inquired if his dinner was not to his taste.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘the dishes are carefully cooked and sent up, but they are all so dreadfully tasteless.’

‘Did not I tell you, my father, that salt was the best thing in life? And yet, when I compared you to salt, to show how much I loved you, you thought slightingly of me and you chased me from your presence.’

The King embraced his daughter, and allowed that he had been wrong to misinterpret her words. Then, for the rest of the wedding feast they gave him bread made with salt, and dishes with seasoning, and he said they were the very best he had ever eaten.