uld rather cut off your nose." And he sharpened his knife on
the door-step.

"Father," said Helen, "the fault was mine; it belongs to me to repair
it. Coranda, will you take my hand instead of my father's nose?"

"Yes," replied Coranda.

"I make one condition," said the young girl. "We will make the same
bargain; the first one of us that is not satisfied after marriage
shall have his nose cut off by the other."

"Good," replied Coranda. "I would rather it was the tongue; but that
will come next."

Never was a finer wedding seen at Prague, and never was there a
happier household. Coranda and the beautiful Helen were a model pair.
The husband and wife were never heard to complain of each other; they
loved with drawn swords, and, thanks to their ingenious bargain, kept
for long years both their love and their noses.

_The Three Citrons_

A Neapolitan Tale

[Illustration: ]

Once upon a time there lived a king who was called the King of the
Vermilion Towers. He had but one son, whom he loved as the apple of
his eye, and who was the only hope of a royal line about to become
extinct. The old king's whole ambition was to marry this illustrious
prince--to find him a princess at once handsome, noble, young, and
rich. He could think of nothing but this wished-for marriage.

Unhappily, among all the virtues in which the heir to a crown is never
lacking, Carlino, for that was the young prince's name, had the
trifling fault of being shyer than a deer. He shook his head and fled
to the woods at the mere sound of a woman's name, to the great grief
of his father, who was in despair at seeing his family about to die
out. But his grief was in vain; nothing touched the heart of Carlino.
The tears of a father, the prayers of a whole people, the interest of
the state, nothing could melt this stony heart. Twenty preachers had
wasted their eloquence and thirty senators their Latin in reasoning
with him. To be stubborn is one of the privileges of royalty, as
Carlino had known from his birth, and he would have thought himself
dishonored by being second to a mule in obstinacy.

But more things often happen in an hour than in a hundred years, and
no one can say with safety, "This is a road that I shall never
travel." One morning at breakfast, as Carlino, instead of listening to
his father's sermon, was amusing himself by watching the flies buzzing
in the air, he forgot that he had a knife in his hand, and pricked his
finger