Page:Turkish fairy tales and folk tales (1901).djvu/270

 would, and after thanking her with tears of joy for her hospitality and for her glad tidings, she went on her way.

The poor woman turned night into day. She stopped neither to eat nor to rest, so fiercely did the desire to find her husband burn within her. She went on and on till she quite wore out the third pair of sandals. She threw them away, and began to walk with bare feet. She cared not for the hard clumps of earth, she took no heed of the thorns that entered into her feet, nor of the pain she suffered when she stumbled over the hard stones. At last she came to a green and beauteous meadow on the margin of a forest, and her heart rejoiced within her when she felt the soft grass and saw the sweet flowers. She stopped and rested a little. But when she saw the birds in couples and couples on the branches of the trees, a burning desire for her own husband came upon her, and she began to weep bitterly, and with her child on her arm, and her bundle of bones in her girdle, she went on her way. She entered the forest. She did not once look at the soft green turf which soothed her feet, she listened not to the birds that chirped enough to deafen her, she regarded not the flowers that peeped out from among the bushes, but groped her way step by step into the depths of the forest. For from the tokens given her by the mother