Then he embraced and kissed his daughter, and also embraced affectionately the prince, praising them as the best of children that ever king had. But suddenly his face darkened with a frown, and he said, "What shall we do with those six nidings (worthless fellows) who call themselves my sons? They shall all be put to death."
But the prince and princess said, "Not so. They would buy their lives as the reward for having brought the king the renewal of his youth." The prince also requested that he might have the six sons delivered to him, engaging to make useful men of them in less than five years. To this the king, no longer called the old, readily consented; and when the feast of rejoicing was ended, the prince again took the wonderful ship from his pocket, and placing in it the six unworthy brothers, he bade the ship sail away to a region of wild and far-off mountains, where he delivered them to the keeping of the Dwarfs, who made them hew stone in the quarries, fell timber and shape it in the forests and work at the anvil in their smithies. There they laboured from day to day severely, and lived on the coarsest fare, till wisdom and better thoughts by degrees came into them, and they sent and petitioned that the king, their father, would forgive them, and place them in one of the lowest offices in his kingdom, where they might practise before all men the humility and gravity which they had acquired from the Dwarfs, and the solitude, the labour, and the frugal fair.
The king, having consented to this prayer, and found them true to their word, divided his kingdom amongst them, and sailed away with the prince and princess in the wonderful ship to the island east of the sun and west of the world, where he eats freely of the apples of youth, and drinks daily of the fountain of immortality, and feels that he is a king indeed.
[1] Odin had his ship of this kind, called Skidbladnir, or the skating leaf, and in the Scandinavian Sagas such convenient vessels are frequently mentioned.
THE HOLIDAYS AT BARENBURG CASTLE.
BY OTTILIE WILDERMUTH.
CHAPTER I.—BREAKING UP.
It was very hot in the school-room at Steinheim, almost as hot as in an oven, although the faded green blinds were drawn down. Neither learning nor teaching goes forward satisfactorily on such days; and, indeed, it was as much as the good schoolmaster could do, especially during this hot summer, to keep himself and his dear children awake over their books. When he walked up and down the narrow space between his tall chair and the school-benches, like a caged lion, the children asked one another anxiously, "Do you think he is angry?" not knowing that he only did so to prevent himself from falling fast asleep in his chair. There was not much danger of this happening among the children, for if any one of them dropped his head somewhat over his book, another was sure to tickle him under the nose with a pen-feather, so that he suddenly woke up again.