ice and thrice she sang, then threw
herself on her knees by the edge, and peered into the dark water, but
the trees cast such a deep shadow that her eyes could not pierce it.

'Djulung cannot be dead, or his body would be floating on the surface,'
she said to herself, and rising to her feet she set out homewards,
feeling all of a sudden strangely tired.

'What is the matter with me?' she thought, but somehow or other she
managed to reach the hut, and threw herself down in a corner, where she
slept so soundly that for days no one was able to wake her.

At length, one morning early, a cock began to crow so loud that
she could sleep no longer and as he continued to crow she seemed to
understand what he was saying, and that he was telling her that Djulung
was dead, killed and eaten by her sisters, and that his bones lay buried
under the kitchen fire. Very softly she got up, and took up the large
stone under the fire, and creeping out carried the bones to the cave
by the fountain, where she dug a hole and buried them anew. And as she
scooped out the hole with a stick she sang a song, bidding the bones
grow till they became a tree--a tree that reached up so high into the
heavens that its leaves would fall across the sea into another island,
whose king would pick them up.

As there was no Djulung to give her rice to, the girl soon became fat
again, and as she was able to do her work as of old, her sisters did not
trouble about her. They never guessed that when she went into the forest
to gather her sticks, she never failed to pay a visit to the tree, which
grew taller and more wonderful day by day. Never was such a tree seen
before. Its trunk was of iron, its leaves were of silk, its flowers of
gold, and its fruit of diamonds, and one evening, though the girl did
not know it, a soft breeze took one of the leaves, and blew it across
the sea to the feet of one of the king's attendants.

'What a curious leaf! I have never beheld one like it before. I must
show it to the king,' he said, and when the king saw it he declared he
would never rest until he had found the tree which bore it, even if he
had to spend the rest of his life in visiting the islands that lay all
round. Happily for him, he began with the island that was nearest, and
here in the forest he suddenly saw standing before him the iron tree,
its boughs covered with shining leaves like the one he carried about
him.

'But what sort of a tree is it, and how did it g