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Tales from the Fjeld

The lad no sooner got it on his finger than he wished the tower might rend asunder, and at the same moment he stood in the doorway and scolded both the king and queen and the princess as a pack of rogues. The king was not slow in calling out his warriors, and bade them throw a ring round the tower and seize the lad and settle him, whether they took him dead or alive. But the lad only wished that all the soldiers might stand up to the armpits in the big moss up in the fjeld, and then they had more than enough to get out again, all that were not left sticking there. After that he began again where he left off with the king and his folk, and when he had got his mouth to say all the bad of them that he knew and willed, he wished they might be shut up all their days in the tower into which they had thrown him. And when they were safe shut up there, he took the land and realm as his own. Then the dog became a prince and the cat a princess again; her he took and married, and the last I heard of them was, that they kept it up at the bridal both well and long.