Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE STORY OF ARGILIUS AND THE FLAME KING. Slavonic. N a certain distant land once reigned a king and queen, who had three daughters and one son. As the king and queen were talking one day together about family matters, the king said to his consort: ' Whenever our daughters happen to marry, we shall be obliged to give to each of their husbands a portion of our kingdom, which will thereby be greatly diminished; I think therefore that we can not do better than marry them all three to our son, and so the kingdom will remain entire. In another eight days, harvest will be over, and then we will celebrate the nuptials.' The son overheard this discourse, and thought within himself, ' that shall never come to pass.' Now the king and queen having gone to a distant farm to superintend the reapers, some one approached the window, knocked at it, and said to the prince: ' Little prince, I am come to marry your eldest sister.' The young prince replied: ' Wait a moment, you shall have her directly.' He called his eldest sister, and as soon as she entered the room he caught her in his arms, and threw her out of the window. She did not, however, fall to the ground, but on a golden bridge, which was very, very long, in fact it reached to the sun. Her unknown lover took her by the hand, and led her along the golden bridge to his kingdom in the center of the sun, for this unknown happened to be the Sun king. About noon some one else knocKed at the window and said, as the former had done : ' Little prince, I want to marry your second sister.' The little prince replied: ' Wait a moment, you shall have her directly.' He went into his second sister's apartment, lifted her up and threw her out of the window. She did not fall to the ground either, but into a chariot in the air. Four...
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