e 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 ea