for you. Just let the herald go through the town and proclaim
that I will marry the young man to whom this lock of hair belongs, and
then we will find him quickly enough."

"What!" cried the prime-minister; "will, then, the princess marry a man
who has nothing better than a little bit of good luck to help him along
in the world?"

"Yes," said the princess, "I shall if I can find him."

So the herald was sent out around the town proclaiming that the princess
would marry the man to whose head belonged the lock of hair that she
had.

A lock of hair! Why, every man had lost a lock of hair! Maybe the
princess could fit it on again, and then the fortune of him to whom it
belonged would be made. All the men in the town crowded up to the king's
palace. But all for no use, for never a one of them was fitted with his
own hair.

As for Jacob Stuck, he too had heard what the herald had proclaimed.
Yes; he too had heard it, and his heart jumped and hopped within him
like a young lamb in the spring-time. He knew whose hair it was the
princess had. Away he went by himself, and rubbed up his piece of blue
glass, and there stood the Genie.

"What are thy commands?" said he.

"I am," said Jacob Stuck, "going up to the king's palace to marry the
princess, and I would have a proper escort."

"To hear is to obey," said the Genie.

He smote his hands together, and instantly there appeared a score of
attendants who took Jacob Stuck, and led him into another room, and
began clothing him in a suit so magnificent that it dazzled the eyes to
look at it. He smote his hands together again, and out in the court-yard
there appeared a troop of horsemen to escort Jacob Stuck to the palace,
and they were all clad in gold-and-silver armor. He smote his hands
together again, and there appeared twenty-and-one horses--twenty as
black as night and one as white as milk, and it twinkled and sparkled
all over with gold and jewels, and at the head of each horse of the
one-and-twenty horses stood a slave clad in crimson velvet to hold the
bridle. Again he smote his hands together, and there appeared in the
ante-room twenty handsome young men, each with a marble bowl filled with
gold money, and when Jacob Stuck came out dressed in his fine clothes
there they all were.

Jacob Stuck mounted upon the horse as white as milk, the young
men mounted each upon one of the black horses, the troopers in the
gold-and-silver armor wheeled their horses, the trumpe