g his father what he had done and suffered for her. Then they
sent to invite her parents, the King and Queen of Long Field; and they
celebrated the wedding with wonderful festivity, making great sport of
the great ninny of a fox, and concluding at the last of the last that--

"Pain doth indeed a seasoning prove
Unto the joys of constant love."

XV

THE SHE-BEAR

Truly the wise man said well that a command of gall cannot be obeyed
like one of sugar. A man must require just and reasonable things if he
would see the scales of obedience properly trimmed.

From orders which are improper springs resistance which is not easily
overcome, as happened to the King of Rough-Rock, who, by asking what he
ought not of his daughter, caused her to run away from him, at the risk
of losing both honour and life.

There lived, it is said, once upon a time a King of Rough-Rock, who had
a wife the very mother of beauty, but in the full career of her years
she fell from the horse of health and broke her life. Before the candle
of life went out at the auction of her years she called her husband and
said to him, "I know you have always loved me tenderly; show me,
therefore, at the close of my days the completion of your love by
promising me never to marry again, unless you find a woman as beautiful
as I have been, otherwise I leave you my curse, and shall bear you
hatred even in the other world."

The King, who loved his wife beyond measure, hearing this her last
wish, burst into tears, and for some time could not answer a single
word. At last, when he had done weeping, he said to her, "Sooner than
take another wife may the gout lay hold of me; may I have my head cut
off like a mackerel! My dearest love, drive such a thought from your
mind; do not believe in dreams, or that I could love any other woman;
you were the first new coat of my love, and you shall carry away with
you the last rags of my affection."

As he said these words the poor young Queen, who was at the point of
death, turned up her eyes and stretched out her feet. When the King saw
her life thus running out he unstopped the channels of his eyes, and
made such a howling and beating and outcry that all the Court came
running up, calling on the name of the dear soul, and upbraiding
Fortune for taking her from him, and plucking out his beard, he cursed
the stars that had sent him such a misfortune. But bearing in mind the
maxim, "Pain in one's elbow and pain fo