“I cut out the tongue immediately after I killed the beast,” explained the soldier, “and here it is.”
From a bag he carried he shook the tongue out on a table.
“Yes,” cried the princess, “it is he who was my deliverer, and it is he who shall be my husband.”
The charcoal-burner saw that everything was going against him, and he slipped out of sight in the crowd and got away unobserved out of the palace. When search was made for him he was not to be found. “Well,” said the king, “I’m glad he is gone. It is a good riddance, and now let us have the wedding.”
So the soldier married the princess, and the event was celebrated with holidays and banquets throughout the kingdom.
THE FAIRIES OF MERLIN’S CRAG
IN Scotland, long, long ago, there were two brothers named Donald and John Gilray. They lived together in a little cottage and worked for a farmer whose house was about a mile distant. One day the farmer sent them to dig peat turf in a pasture near a wild, rocky bluff known as Merlin’s Crag. After working for a considerable time, they saw coming toward them from the crag a little woman about eighteen inches in height, clad in a green gown, and wearing on her feet a pair of red shoes.
She waved a cane she carried at the astonished laborers, and said: “How would you like it if my husband was to come and take the roof off from your house as you are taking it off from ours? I command you to put back every turf exactly where you found it.”
Then she left them, and the two men, with fear and trembling, replaced the turfs. That done, they went to their master, and told him what had happened. The farmer only laughed at them. “You must have fallen asleep up there on the moor when you ought to have been working,” said he; “and you have had a bad dream to pay you for your neglect. Take a cart and fetch home the turfs you have dug immediately.”