Page:The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories.djvu/340

308 he neglected the needful affairs of his state and household to follow the track of a hare or the flight of a thrush. And he pursued this road so far, that chance one day led him to a thicket, which had formed a solid square of earth and trees, to prevent the horses of the Sun from breaking through. There, upon a most beautiful marble stone, he found a raven, which had just been killed.

The king, seeing the bright red blood sprinkled upon the white white marble, heaved a deep sigh and exclaimed, "O heavens! and cannot I have a wife as white and red as this stone, and with hair and eyebrows as black as the feathers of this raven?" And he stood for awhile so buried in this thought, that he became a counterpart to the stone, and looked like a marble statue making love to the other marble. And this unhappy fancy fixing itself in his head, as he searched for it everywhere with the lanthorn of desire, it grew in four seconds from a picktooth to a pole, from a crab-apple to an Indian pumpkin, from a barber's embers to a glass furnace, and from a dwarf to a giant; insomuch that he thought of nothing else than the image of that object incrusted in his heart as stone to stone. Where-ever he turned his eyes, that form was always presented to him which he carried in his breast; and forgetting all besides, he had nothing but that marble in his head;