“THE RAGPICKER AND THE PRINCESS.”
When I was sixteen years old (said Alb the Fortunate) and my dear Princess Hyla fourteen, the King, her father, sojourned for a time at his castle of Ventamere, beside the sea; and you may be sure that the Princess was with him there, for he could never bear to be parted from her for a single day.
My father followed in the King’s train, and I, on my part, was not to be left behind; and we lodged together, my father and myself, in the town hard by the castle, where I saw the Princess every day, and daily grew in favor with her father.
The windows of the King’s castle looked out across the Great Sea, and beneath the windows of the Princess’s room the tide washed up and down against the wall.
One evening, as it was growing dusk, and the moon was beginning to tinge a wave here and there with silver, the Princess was leaning out from her window and looking across the sea— But what I am now to tell you I did not know at the time, as you will understand, but only later.
Night fell, and still the Princess leaned upon her hand and gazed out across the sea. I do not know whether she was thinking of me, but—However. In the town of Ventamere near by, where the shore curved inward in a bay, lights began to glimmer, but the castle was dark, for the King, intending to commence at daybreak his journey back to his capital, was already a-bed.
The Princess Hears a Voice from the Waves Beneath Her Window
The Princess, beginning to be drowsy, reached out her hand to close the casement of her window; and as she did so she heard a voice, a melancholy voice, not loud, as of a young man singing to himself, directly beneath her window. She started in astonishment and looked down, but she could see no one. The moonlight glittered on the sea to the very base of her wall; there was no foothold anywhere for a human foot; but the voice rose nevertheless from just below her in the restless waters, and it was singing a kind of lament, pausing once to put in a few spoken words, in this wise:
“O quivering seas that sever,