And it came towards midnight.
Once more the door opened, and the beautiful serving-lad came into the room, carrying the tray of silver with something upon it wrapped in a napkin. This time Jacob Stuck gave the princess an emerald ring for a keepsake, and the wonder of it was that every morning two other rings just like it would drop from it.
Then twelve o’clock sounded, the lights went out, and the Genie took the princess home again.
But the Genie had seen what the princess had done. As soon as he had taken her safe home, he struck his palms together and summoned all his companions. “Go,” said he, “throughout the town and trim a lock of hair from over the right ear of every man in the whole place;” and so they did, from the king himself to the beggar-man at the gates. As for the prime-minister, the Genie himself trimmed two locks of hair from him, one from over each of his ears, so that the next morning he looked as shorn as an old sheep. In the morning all the town was in a hubbub, and everybody was wondering how all the men came to have their hair clipped as it was. But the princess had brought the lock of Jacob Stuck’s hair away with her wrapped up in a piece of paper, and there it was.
As for the ring Jacob Stuck had given to her, why, the next morning there were three of them, and the king thought he had never heard tell of such a wonderful thing.
“I tell you,” said the prime-minister, “there is nothing in it but a piece of good luck, and not a grain of virtue. It’s just a piece of good luck—that’s all it is.”
“No matter,” said the king; “I never saw the like of it in all my life before. And now, what are we going to do?”
The prime-minister could think of nothing.
Then the princess spoke up. “Your majesty,” she said, “I can find the young man for you. Just let the herald go through the town and proclaim that I will marry the young man to whom this lock of hair belongs, and then we will find him quickly enough.”
“What!” cried the prime-minister; “will, then, the princess marry a man who has nothing better than a little bit of good luck to help him along in the world?”