Then came the second daughter, and the priest asked her, would she marry him? and she said she would not. And he struck her a blow of his fist, and he said, “How do you know that you are my choice? Haven’t I my choice of you to get?” And the king said he had.
Then came the third girl, and the priest asked her, would she marry him? and she said she would not. And the son of the King of Prussia gave her a blow of his fist, and he said, “How do you know that you are my choice? Haven’t I my choice of you to get?” And the king said he had.
Then the Scotchman got up and he gave the son of the King of Prussia a blow with the tip of his boot and knocked him down. And the king offered a reward of five pounds to whoever would tell who struck the champion. And, as there were bad people present, he was told it was the old man down there who had struck him. He was caught, and he was bound, and when the daughters saw him they knew him, and they threw themselves on their knees before their father and begged he would grant them one request; and he said he would, but that one of them must marry the man.
“It is not for that man we are asking, but for this one, who saved us.”
He put the three daughters in three rooms, and he called the eldest, and she came to him and told him that he was the man who saved her. She put her hand in her pocket and she took out the piece she cut from his champion’s suit, and it answered to the coat. Then the king called the second daughter, and she said likewise, and showed the lock of hair, and her father was satisfied. He called the third daughter, and she showed the shoe, and she said she had no fear of him, that he it was who saved her.
The Scotchman got up standing, and he bound the son of the King of Prussia, and they were going to put him to death. Then the daughters asked the son of the King of Scotland if he would marry any of them, and he said that to one of them he was bound; but that when he knew what the son of the King of Prussia was going to do he came without[12] his father’s leave to Erin to save them, “and I cannot marry a woman till I go to my father and then I will come back to you.”
And the daughter said, “Marry one of us and then go to your father, and then you can come back.”
He said he could not do that, that he would go to his father first. Said she,—
“If you do not marry one of us, I will put you for a year under disesteem and bad esteem; every one will be spitting on you and cursing you; whoever is meanest you shall be under his curses; and till you marry one of us, or get cause for laughter, your mouth to be at the back of your head.”
And when he saw that, “If I were going this hour to marry you, I would not marry you now.”