“Your wonderful highness, what has happened?” they cried.
“I have repented!” replied the Tsar.
Henceforth he became so humble and mild that people called him the Merciful Tsar. He took a basket of food and carried it to the poor people who had only one woody turnip to eat, and he went to the lame old man with a bottle of liniment and rubbed his back till it got well, and every day he sent some gift, a jewel or a gold-piece or a silver thimble, or something of the sort, to comfort the girl whose lover had been beheaded for contradicting him. He gave his wooden palace to his lords and ladies, and moved into a tiny brown hut, moss-covered and patched and without window-panes, way at the end of the village. No beggar ever went empty-handed from his door; and if a little boy cut his finger or bumped his knee, the other boys would say:
“Go to the Tsar, Aliushka, he will put a rag with ointment on it and make it well!”
Soon he had given away so much of his wealth that he was quite the poorest man in the village. One day just as he sat down to eat his last piece of dry bread, a very weary old woman came to his door and said:
“Alms, alms, for the love of St. Peter, O most Merciful Tsar!”
“I have nothing but this piece of bread, but you may have it,” he replied, and gave her his frugal dinner. The old woman sank down upon the block of wood that was his only chair.
“Ah, but you don’t know how weary I am!” she sighed, nibbling the bread with her toothless gums. “I have no hut to live in, no place to lay my head, no roof to shelter me from the icy winter.”