“Sir,” said I to him, “will you tell us who you are, and what brings you here?”
“I am a sorcerer,” said he, “and I dwell in an island far out in the Great Sea. I am known there as the One-Armed Sorcerer. I came here, with the genie whom I command by virtue of a ring of his hair, in order to prove my skill against the witch. I undertook to release our good friend the Highwayman and his ten fair daughters, but I am bound to say that I managed it badly; so badly that the witch got the genie’s hair away from me, and by means of that hair turned him into a dog and shut me up inside the wasp’s nest. And all because I didn’t know the rule, that you mustn’t speak before you’re spoken to.”
“A pretty good rule,” said I, “but if everybody observed it, who would ever talk?”
“Well, anyway,” said the One-Armed Sorcerer, “here I have ten buttons, and here I have ten threads from the genie’s head. I propose to make you a doublet, sir; a magic doublet; and for the cloth, the wasp’s nest will be the very thing. It will be a doublet worth having; and to you, sir, who have so nobly preserved us all, I will present it on—er—ahem!—on your wedding day.”
“Hurrah!” piped up the elderly Highwayman, and the lady on my arm blushed.
“Oh, isn’t that sweet of him?” cried her nine sisters. “Isn’t it just too sweet for anything? It’s really the sweetest thing, now isn’t it? Too perfectly sweet for words, it is, really!”
The One-Armed Sorcerer, stepping over to the wasp’s nest, pulled it down from the tree without breaking it, and slung it on his back.
“Come with me!” I cried. “You shall all return with me to my father’s castle. Will you consent to that?”
“Well,” said the elderly Highwayman,—
“Though anxious to accommodate, I fear it’s growing rather late,