THE STOOL OF FORTUNE

ho!” thought he, ‘‘so the soldier has found out all about
the three-legged stool, has he? Well, I will just put a
spoke into his wheel for him.” And so he began to
watch for his chance to do the soldier an ill turn.

Now, a week or two after the wedding, and after al]
the gay doings had ended, a grand hunt was declared,
and the king and his new son-in-law and all the court
went to it. That was just such a chance as the old
magician had been waiting for; so the night before
the hunting-party returned he climbed the walls of
the garden, and so came to the wonderful palace that
the soldier had built out of nothing at all, and there
stood three men keeping guard so that no one might
enter.

But little that troubled the magician. He began to
mutter spells and strange words, and all of a sudden he
was gone, and in his place was a great black ant, for he
had changed himself into an ant. In he ran through a
crack of the door (and mischief has got into many a man’s
house through a smaller hole for the matter of that). In
and out ran the ant through one room and another, and
up and down and here and there, until at last in a far-
away part of the magic palace he found the three-legged
stool, and if I had been in the soldier’s place I would have
chopped it up into kindling-wood after I had gotten all
that I wanted. But there it was, and in an instant the
magician resumed his own shape. Down he sat him
upon the stool. ‘I wish,” said he, “that this palace and
the princess and all who are within it, together with its
orchards and its lawns and its gardens and everything,
may be removed to such and such a country, upon the
other side of the earth.”

17 B