The Wonder Clock: four & twenty marvellous Tales

here was a king travelling through the country, and he and those with him were so far away from home that darkness caught them by the heels, and they had to stop at a stone mill for the night, because there was no other place handy. While they sat at supper, they heard a sound in the next room, and it was a baby crying. The miller stood in the corner, back of the stove, with his hat in his hand. "What is that noise?" said the king to him. "Oh! it is nothing but another baby that the good storks have brought into the house to-day," said the miller. Now there was a wise man travelling along with the king, who could read the stars and everything that they told as easily as one can read one's A B C's in a book after one knows them, and the king, for a bit of a jest, would have him find out what the stars had to foretell of the miller's baby. So the wise man went out and took a peep up in the sky, and by and by he came in again. "Well," said the king, "and what did the stars tell you?" "The stars tell me," said the wise man, "that you shall have a daughter, and that the miller's baby, in the room yonder, shall marry her when they are old enough to think of such things." "What!" said the king, "and is a miller's baby to marry the princess that is to come! We will see about that." So the next day he took the miller aside and talked and bargained, and bargained and talked, until the upshot of the matter was that the miller was paid two hundred dollars, and the king rode off with the baby. As soon as he came home to the castle he called his chief forester to him. "Here," says he, "take this baby and do thus and so with it, and when you have killed it bring its heart to me, that I may know that you have really done as you have been told." So off marched the forester with the baby; but on his way he stopped at home, and there was his good wife working about the house. "Well, Henry," said she, "what do you do with the baby?" "Oh!" said he, "I am just taking it off to the forest to do thus and so with it." "Come," said she, "it would be a pity to harm the little innocent, and to have its blood on your hands. Yonder hangs the rabbit that you shot this morning, and its heart will please the king just as well as the other."