So they all went. And when they woke the Magician, who was sleeping quietly in his own private room in the palace where the Princess had once lived, he sneezed seven times for pure joy, and then called for Welsh rabbit and baked Spanish onions for supper.
'For after all these years of starvation,' he said, 'I do really think I may for once take a liberty with my digestion.'
So he had the supper he wanted; but the King and the Princess had roses and lilies and wedding-cake, because they were married that very evening.
And when you have passed through exactly the sort of fire those two had passed through, you can never be old, or ugly, or unhappy again, so those two are happy, and beautiful, and young to this very hour.
THE WHITE HORSE
'Please, father,' Diggory said, 'I want to go out and seek my fortune.'
'Seek your grandmother,' said his father, but not unkindly. He was smoking a pipe outside his cottage door, and he had a red-spotted handkerchief over his head because of the flies. There were flies then, just the same as there are now, though it was a hundred years ago by the church clock.
'I wasn't thinking of my grandmother,' said Diggory; 'I was thinking of my Uncle Diggory. He was the third son of a woodcutter, just like I am, and he saw right enough that that's the sort that has to go out and seek its fortune. And I'm getting on, father; I shall be twenty before you know where you are.'
'You'll have to be twenty and more before I agree not to know where you are,' said his father. 'Your Uncle Diggory did well for himself, sure enough, and many a turkey and chine he's sent us at Christmas-time; but he started a-horseback, he did. He got the horse from his Uncle Diggory, and he was a rover too. Now, if you went, you'd have to go on Shank's mare, and them that go a-foot comes back a-foot.'