"Me, too!" said Jakov, the second son. "When I tried to tell her that funny story of how I traded the moldy oats for the old widow's fat pig, instead of laughing she looked me straight in the face and said: 'Cheat!'"
"Stefan ought to go," Mihailo suggested. "Maybe she'd laugh at him! Everybody else does!"
He spoke sneeringly but Stefan only smiled.
"Who knows? Perhaps I will go. If I do make her laugh then, O my brothers, the laugh will be on you for I shall become Tsar and you two will be known as my two poor brothers. Ho! Ho! Ho! What a joke that would be!"
Stefan laughed loud and heartily and his little sister joined him, but his brothers looked at him sourly.
"He grows more foolish all the time!" they told each other.
When they were gone to bed, Militza slipped over to Stefan and whispered in his ear:
"Brother, you must go to the Princess. Tell her the story that begins: In my young days when I was an old, old man.... I think she'll just have to laugh, and if she laughs then she can eat and she must be very hungry by this time."
At first Stefan said no, he wouldn't go, but Militza insisted and finally, to please her, he said he would.
So early the next morning he dressed himself in his fine Sunday shirt with its blue and red embroidery. He put on his bright red Sunday sash and his long shiny boots. Then he mounted his horse and before his brothers were awake rode off to the Tsar's castle.