made to look as well as she could, he set forth with her to meet the King and Queen, who were to meet the young couple a few miles from their home.
"A black crow."
When his father and mother perceived the folly their son had committed, and how that he who had travelled so far in search of a white dove had only returned with a black crow, they could hardly restrain their disgust and disappointment. But, seeing the thing was done, and that there was no help for it, they abandoned their throne to the young couple, and a gold crown was placed on the slave's woolly head. The wedding was held with much pomp and ceremony, and everyone far and wide was invited to the feast.
Now it happened that while the King's cook was preparing all the dainty dishes for the wedding banquet a beautiful dove flew in at the kitchen window, and said—
"Tell me, cook, oh! tell me true,
What do the King and his black bride do?"
At first the cook paid no attention to the words of the bird; but when the dove had repeated them a second and a third time, he ran into the banqueting hall, and told the assembled company what the bird had said. When the bride heard the words of the dove's song, she ordered the bird to be caught on the spot and roasted. The cook did as he was told, seized the bird, and wrung its neck, and, when he had plucked its feathers, he threw them out of the kitchen window. A few days afterwards, on the spot where the feathers had been thrown, a beautiful lemon tree sprang up, which grew and blossomed as you looked at it.
Now it happened one day that the King was looking out of his window, and saw the tree, which he never remembered to have noticed before. He immediately called the cook before him, and asked him when and by whom the tree had been planted. When he had heard the whole story from the chief cook, he gave orders that no one, under pain of death, should touch the tree, and that it should be tended and watered carefully every day.
In a very short time three lemons appeared on the tree exactly the same as those the old woman had given the Prince, and he had them plucked at once and brought to his room. Here he shut himself up with a tumbler full of water, and with the same knife that he had used before, and which he always wore at his side, he began to cut the lemons in half. As before, the first and second fairy escaped him; but when he had cut the third lemon open, and given the fairy some water to drink, as she requested, she changed into the beautiful girl whom he had left behind in the hollow of the tree, and from her he learnt the whole history of the black slave's misdeeds.
