They went there; they saw the heads.
‘It was I who killed him. Your son saw the sword in my hands, and he thought I would kill them. I could not tell him the truth.’
He was turned into stone to his head. They made a tomb for him.
The king’s son arose; he took the road; he departed. ‘Seven years has he wandered for me, I am going to wander seven years for him.’
The king’s son went walking, walking. In a certain place there was water; he drank of it; he lay down. Baldpate came to him in a dream: ‘Take a little earth from here, and go and sprinkle it on the tomb. He will rise from the stone.’
The king’s son slept and slept. He arose; he takes some of the earth; he went to the tomb; he sprinkled the earth on it. Baldpate arose. ‘How sound I’ve been sleeping!’ he said.
‘Seven years hast thou wandered for me, and seven years I have wandered for thee.’ [[9]]
He takes him, he brings him to the palace, he makes him a great one.
Miklosich’s Bukowina-Gypsy story, ‘The Prince, his Comrade, and Nastasa the Fair’ (No. 24) presents analogies; but ‘Baldpate’ is identical with Grimm’s No. 6, ‘Faithful John,’ i. pp. 23 and 348, where in the variant the third peril is a seven-headed dragon. Cf. also Wolf’s Hausmärchen (Gött. 1851), p. 383; Basile’s Pentamerone (1637), iv. 9; Hahn, i. 201–208, and ii. 267–277; and especially the Rev. Lal Behari Day’s Folk-tales of Bengal (London, 1883), pp. 39–52, the latter half of ‘Phakir Chand.’ Here two immortal birds warn the minister’s son of four perils threatening the king’s son:—(1) riding an elephant; (2) from fall of gate; (3) choking by fish-head; (4) cobra. Penalty of telling, to be turned into statue. Another Indian version is ‘Rama and Luxman; or, the Learned Owl,’ in Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days, No. 5, pp. 66–78, whose ending is very feeble. See also Reinhold Köhler’s Aufsätze über Märchen und Volkslieder (Berlin, 1894), pp. 24–35.