Pagina 369 de 626

At last came the little dwarf's turn; and he looked in the moss;

but it was so hard to find the pearls, and the job was so

tiresome!--so he sat down upon a stone and cried. And as he sat

there, the king of the ants (whose life he had saved) came to

help him, with five thousand ants; and it was not long before

they had found all the pearls and laid them in a heap.

The second tablet said: 'The key of the princess's bed-chamber

must be fished up out of the lake.' And as the dwarf came to the

brink of it, he saw the two ducks whose lives he had saved

swimming about; and they dived down and soon brought in the key

from the bottom.

The third task was the hardest. It was to choose out the youngest

and the best of the king's three daughters. Now they were all

beautiful, and all exactly alike: but he was told that the eldest

had eaten a piece of sugar, the next some sweet syrup, and the

youngest a spoonful of honey; so he was to guess which it was

that had eaten the honey.