ks are come," said the people in the rich house on the
banks of the Nile, where the royal lord lay in the open hall on the
downy cushions, covered with a leopard skin, not alive and yet not
dead, but waiting and hoping for the lotos-flower from the deep
moorland, in the far North. Friends and servants stood around his
couch.

[Illustration: THE KING OF EGYPT'S RECOVERY.]

And into the hall flew two beauteous swans. They had come with the
storks. They threw off their dazzling white plumage, and two lovely
female forms were revealed, as like each other as two dewdrops. They
bent over the old, pale, sick man, they put back their long hair, and
while Helga bent over her grandfather, his white cheeks reddened, his
eyes brightened, and life came back to his wasted limbs. The old man
rose up cheerful and well; and daughter and granddaughter embraced him
joyfully, as if they were giving him a morning greeting after a long
heavy dream.

And joy reigned through the whole house, and likewise in the stork's
nest, though there the chief cause was certainly the good food,
especially the numberless frogs, which seemed to spring up in heaps
out of the ground; and while the learned men wrote down hastily, in
flying characters, a sketch of the history of the two princesses, and
of the flower of health that had been a source of joy for the home and
the land, the stork pair told the story to their family in their own
fashion, but not till all had eaten their fill, otherwise the
youngsters would have found something more interesting to do than to
listen to stories.

"Now, at last, you will become something," whispered stork-mamma,
"there's no doubt about that."

"What should I become?" asked stork-papa. "What have I done? Nothing
at all!"

"You have done more than the rest! But for you and the youngsters the
two princesses would never have seen Egypt again, or have effected the
old man's cure. You will turn out something! They must certainly give
you a doctor's degree, and our youngsters will inherit it, and so will
their children after them, and so on. You already look like an
Egyptian doctor; at least in my eyes."

"I cannot quite repeat the words as they were spoken," said
stork-papa, who had listened from the roof to the report of these
events, made by the learned men, and was now telling it again to his
own family. "What they said was so confused, it was so wise and
learned, that they immediately received rank and presents--e