Page:The folk-tales of the Magyars.djvu/259

 Rh girl away and went back to his mistress. The woman took the lungs and liver, put them into her mouth, and said, "You have come out of me, you must return into me," and swallowed them. The two hands she threw up into the loft. The servant left the woman's house in a great hurry at the earliest opportunity, and never returned again. In the meantime the girl without hands wandered about in unknown places. Fearing that she would be discovered in the daytime, she hid herself in the wood, and only left her hiding place at night to find food, and if she chanced to get into an orchard she ate the fruit she could reach with her mouth.

At last she came to the town where the king lived: the prince had by this time returned from the war. One morning, the king was looking out of his window, and to his great annoyance discovered that, again, there were less pears on a favourite tree in the orchard than he had counted the previous day. In a great rage he sent for the gardener, whose special business it was to take care of the orchard; but he excused himself on the ground that while he was watching the orchard at night an irresistible desire to sleep came over him, the like of which he had never experienced before, and which he was quite unable to shake off. The king, therefore, ordered another man to keep watch under the tree the next night, but he fared in the same way as the first; the king was still more angry. On the third night, the prince himself volunteered to keep watch, and promised to guard the fruit of the favourite tree; he laid down on the lawn under the tree, and did not shut his eyes. About midnight, the girl without hands came forth from a thicket in the garden, and, seeing the prince, said to him, "One of your eyes is asleep, the other one must go to sleep too, at once." No sooner had she uttered these words than the prince fell fast asleep, and the girl without hands walked under the tree, and picked the fruit with her mouth. But as there were only a few more pears left on the boughs which she could get at, she was obliged, in