When the prince had eaten and drunk, he set off, and soon came to a forest, and sure enough it was full of lions and tigers, and bears and wolves, who came rushing towards him; but instead of springing on him and tearing him to pieces, they lay down on the ground and licked his hands. He speedily found the tree with the apples which his mother wanted, but the branches were so high he could not reach them, and there was no way of climbing up the smooth trunk.
‘It is no use after all, I can’t get up there,’ he said to himself. ‘What am I to do now?’
But, as he turned away, his sword chanced to touch the tree, and immediately two apples fell down. He picked them up joyfully, and was going away when a little dog came out of a hill close by, and running up to him, began tugging at his clothes and whining.
‘What do you want, little dog?’ asked the prince, stooping down to pat his soft black head.
The dog ran to a hole that was in the hill and sat there looking out, as much as to say: ‘Come along in with me.’
‘I may as well go and see what is in there,’ thought the prince, and he went over to the hill. But the hole was so small that he could not get through it, so he thrust his sword into it, and immediately it became larger.
‘Ha, ha!’ he chuckled; ‘it’s worth something to have a sword like that.’ And he bent down and crept through the hole.
The first thing he beheld, when he entered a room at the very end of a dark passage, was a beautiful princess, who was bound by an iron chain to an iron pillar.
‘What evil fate brought you here?’ he asked in surprise: and the lady answered: