I dragged my mother to the shop door, and we looked up and down the street. There was no sign of him. I ran from one corner to the other. He was nowhere in sight. I returned to my mother and threw myself on her breast and wept.
“The chain!” I sobbed. “It is gone!”
While she tried to comfort me I told her the story. She wrung her hands. “What will your father say?”
That evening, when my father heard what had happened, he was very angry. He was a kind man, but he scolded me so severely that I crept up to bed weeping, without any supper. I had never been so miserable. I cried myself to sleep.
When I awoke in the morning, sunshine was streaming in through the window. I sprang out of bed. A fat sparrow was hopping on the window sill, and when he saw me he cocked his head at me in the jolliest manner possible. I whistled to him, and laughed after him as he flew away.
While I was dressing, and humming a tune the while, I suddenly remembered that I had gone to bed in tears for the loss of my father’s golden chain; but I laughed as I thought of it, for the loss seemed pitifully small, and my father’s anger over it was quite ridiculous. I went on with my tune, and stood before the mirror with a hairbrush in my hand. I began to brush my hair; and I cannot deny that as I looked at its yellow and somewhat curly abundance I thought of the Princess with complacency.
Now it happened that the most serious work of my life, on which I had then been engaged for more than six months, had been the training of my hair to lie in a flat sweep backward from my forehead. I had devoted much patient labor to this work; it required that I should wear on my head all day a tight skullcap, and I even suffered to the extent of wearing it in bed at night, when I could do so without my mother’s knowledge. I now shook my hair from my forehead with a quick backward toss of the head, in a manner which always made my father look at me in alarm, and proceeded to brush it straight back with vigorous strokes of the brush.
The Three Black Hairs in the Yellow Head
I was in the act of applying a small quantity of dry soap, when I looked at my yellow head in the mirror a trifle more attentively. My gaze became fixed; and as I held my head close to the glass I was astonished to see there, among the yellow strands, three coarse black hairs, very distinct, one in the middle and one on either side.