When the widow heard these words she was forced to struggle with her feelings ere she answered: 'Well, my son, my child! Do what you can not help doing when you return I shall see you again, and if you don't come back I shall not weep for you, because the journey you have in view is a long one therefore if you are absent a long time there will always be the hope of your return.'Īfter saying this she mixed three loaves for him with her own milk, one of meal, the second of bran, and the third of ashes from the hearth. I don't know whether I shall find her, but at least I hope so, and that hope I leave with you for your consolation.' 'Mother, I have neither rest nor peace here so long as I see you so sick and sorrowful from constantly thinking of my sister I have determined to go out into the wide world and not return till I can bring news of her. When he had reached his eighteenth year he made himself a pair of calf-skin sandals with steel soles, went to his mother, and said:. The boy, seeing his mother so melancholy, tried to grow stronger and stronger, and counted the days before he should be large enough to go out into the world and seek his sister, little Rosy Cheeks, along untrodden paths filled with thorns. But much as she loved him she was cheerless and sad, for, dear me! a boy is only a boy, but a girl is a girl, especially when she is beautiful.

She watched him like the apple of her eye and would not let him go a single step away from her. From that day the widow loved her son hundreds and thousands of times better than before, because he was now her only child and the sole joy she had in the world.

But when the girl had reached her sixteenth year, the same thing befell her that happens to all beautiful maidens-a dragon came, stole her, and carried her far away to the shore of another country.

The boy was such a brave fellow that he would have torn the snakes' tongues out of their mouths, and the girl was so beautiful that the emperor's sons and handsome princes of every land were waiting impatiently for her to grow up, that they might go and court her. There was once a poor widow, so poor that even the flies would not stay in her house, and this widow had two children, a boy and a girl. If it hadn't happened, it wouldn't be told.

Swords and sandals 3 online