Twilight Land | Page 7

King of the Wind to live
in."
"You shall have it," said the king," and it shall be the great parade
ground back of the palace, which is so wide and long that all my army
can march round and round in it without getting into its own way; and
that ought to be big enough."
"Yes," said the soldier, "it is." Thereupon he put on his feather cap and
disappeared from the sight of all as quickly as one might snuff out a
candle.
He mounted his three-legged stool and away he flew through the air
until he had come again to the tavern where he was lodging. There he
sat him down and began to churn his thoughts, and the butter he made
was worth the having, I can tell you. He wished for a grand palace of
white marble, and then he wished for all sorts of things to fill it--the
finest that could be had. Then he wished for servants in clothes of gold
and silver, and then he wished for fine horses and gilded coaches. Then
he wished for gardens and orchards and lawns and flower-plats and
fountains, and all kinds and sorts of things, until the sweat ran down his

face from hard thinking and wishing. And as he thought and wished, all
the things he thought and wished for grew up like soap-bubbles from
nothing at all.
Then, when day began to break, he wished himself with his fine clothes
to be in the palace that his own wits had made, and away he flew
through the air until he had come there safe and sound.
But when the sun rose and shone down upon the beautiful palace and
all the gardens and orchards around it, the king and queen and all the
court stood dumb with wonder at the sight. Then, as they stood staring,
the gates opened and out came the soldier riding in his gilded coach
with his servants in silver and gold marching beside him, and such a
sight the daylight never looked upon before that day.
Well, the princess and the soldier were married, and if no couple had
ever been happy in the world before, they were then. Nothing was
heard but feasting and merrymaking, and at night all the sky was lit
with fireworks. Such a wedding had never been before, and all the
world was glad that it had happened.
That is, all the world but one; that one was the old man dressed in
scarlet that the soldier had met when he first came to town. While all
the rest were in the hubbub of rejoicing, he put on his thinking-cap, and
by-and-by began to see pretty well how things lay, and that, as they say
in our town, there was a fly in the milk-jug. "Ho, ho!" thought he, "so
the soldier has found out all about the three-legged stool, has he? Well,
I will just put a spoke into his wheel for him." And so he began to
watch for his chance to do the soldier an ill turn.
Now, a week or two after the wedding, and after all the gay doings had
ended, a grand hunt was declared, and the king and his new son-in-law
and all the court went to it. That was just such a chance as the old
magician had been waiting for; so the night before the hunting-party
returned he climbed the walls of the garden, and so came to the
wonderful palace that the soldier had built out of nothing at all, and
there stood three men keeping guard so that no one might enter.
But little that troubled the magician. He began to mutter spells and
strange words, and all of a sudden he was gone, and in his place was a
great black ant, for he had changed himself into an ant. In he ran
through a crack of the door (and mischief has got into many a man's
house through a smaller hole for the matter of that). In and out ran the

ant through one room and another, and up and down and here and there,
until at last in a far-away part of the magic palace he found the
three-legged stool, and if I had been in the soldier's place I would have
chopped it up into kindling-wood after I had gotten all that I wanted.
But there it was, and in an instant the magician resumed his own shape.
Down he sat him upon the stool. "I wish," said he, "that this palace and
the princess and all who are within it, together with its orchards and its
lawns and its gardens and everything, may be removed to such and
such a country, upon the other side of the earth."
And