“His servants have done everything for him. Aren’t you ashamed to have a husband who can do nothing at all for himself?”
The daughter had a proud and haughty temper, and her pride began to rise up angrily. So next day she commanded three hundred loads of wood to be brought and piled up in the palace yard and set alight. Then she told the prince that he had performed the tasks only by the help of his servants, and before she would marry him some one must sit upon the woodpile and stay there till it was burned out; for she thought no servant would do so much for him, and he surely would have to do this himself. However, she was wrong, for the freezing man claimed this as his share of the work, and he mounted the woodpile without delay.
For three days and three nights it blazed away, till only ashes were left, and there stood the freezing man shivering like a jelly.
“If it had burned much longer, I should have been benumbed with the cold,” he said, with chattering teeth.
Now, the princess saw that she could delay no longer, so they set off to the church, but the queen made yet another attempt to prevent the wedding. She called her attendants, and sent them to waylay the party and kill every one but the princess. However, the listener had been keeping his ears open, and he heard this order; so they put on more speed and reached the church first, and were married. At the church door the five servants took leave of their master and went out into the world to try their fortune alone.
The prince and his wife set forth on their homeward journey, and at the end of the first day they came upon a village where a swineherd stood feeding his pigs.
“Do you know who I am?” said the prince to his wife. “Yonder man is my father, and our duty now is to tend the pigs with him.”
They went into the cottage, and during the night the prince took away her splendid clothes, so that in the morning she had to put on an old dress and shoes belonging to the swineherd’s wife.
These were given to her grudgingly, and only for her husband’s sake, as the woman told her. So the princess was now very miserable, and believed that her husband was really a swineherd; but she determined to make the best of it, and turn to and do her share of the work, and said to herself:
“It is a punishment for all my pride.”