The faces of both boys brightened instantly.
“Oh, please, tell us the story!” cried Squib. “I do so like your stories, and you have so many of them.”
“Well,” answered Herr Adler, “I will tell you this one. It happened that one evening, many years ago now, I was taking an evening walk with some friends of mine; and towards dusk we found ourselves near to the house of an old friend whom we had none of us seen for a long time. Although it was late, we thought we would call in and see him, and he gave us a very warm welcome. We sat round the stove for a time; and then he asked us if we would stay and have supper with him, which we agreed to do. Now, he was not a rich man, and he lived quite simply, as German people often do, you know. But his wife bustled about and laid the table, and gave us an excellent supper of good milk soup, and plenty of good bread and butter. We were hungry after our walk, and enjoyed it all greatly; but the hostess was not at all content at having nothing better to offer us, and she kept telling us how sorry she was she had not known beforehand of our visit that she might have had a better supper. We told her we wanted nothing better, but she could not be satisfied; and at last her husband looked up at her with a smile on his face, and said,—
“’Now wife, be content; say no more, else I tell our good friends here a story.’
“At that she smiled too, and a different look came into her face; and she answered in another tone,—
“’Nay, then, I will say no more;’ and she did not.
“But, then, of course, we were all very curious to hear the story, and we pressed our host to tell it us. So when the supper was finished, and we had gathered round the stove again with our pipes, he told us.
“Once upon a time there was a prince, and he went a-hunting in a great forest near to his castle. Now this prince, like so many of the princes in stories (and, perhaps, in real life too), was a rather self-willed and self-confident young man, reckless in his ways, and bent on doing as he chose. And it came to pass that upon this day he outrode all his followers and nobles in pursuit of the quarry, and presently found himself quite alone in the heart of the great forest. He blew his horn again and again, but nobody came to his aid; and he did not know which way to turn, nor even in what direction his castle lay. He was quite lost. He was getting very tired too, and it was growing dusk. Also he was extremely hungry, for he had not tasted food since the mid-day meal in the forest, and now it was long past the hour when he generally partook of a sumptuous repast.
“At last, as he was growing quite desperate—having wandered hither and thither for over an hour, and the light beginning now to fade quite out of the sky—he found a little track in the wood, and following it eagerly in hopes of coming across some hut or habitation, he reached a little clearing in which stood a charcoal-burner’s rude hut. But the hut itself was empty, for the charcoal-burner was busy over his meiler a few yards away—so busy that he never so much as observed the approach of the prince.”