e of the
hacienda. There they all lived together, but Pusong and his wife,
who in former times had treated Singalong very harshly, giving him
only the bones and scraps from the table, were now obliged to act as
servants in the kitchen of the king's new palace.

CHAPTER 8

The Enchanted Ring.

There was once a king who had suffered for a long time with a painful
disease, in spite of all the efforts of the doctors to cure it. At
last he caused a proclamation to be made that whoever could cure him
should marry his daughter as a reward.

One day a snake appeared before the king and asked permission to cure
him. The king at first refused, but the snake said that his body
contained some gall whose power to cure was wonderful, so the king
consented to try it, and was soon cured.

The snake was really a prince who had been changed into this form
by enchantment. Every night he took on his proper form and went for
a walk around the city. His wife once saw him do this, so she asked
him to tell her the truth. The snake told her his secret, but forbade
her to tell any one, on pain of his leaving her.

One day the other daughters of the king consulted as to how they
should find out the truth about their sister's husband. They took
their sister into the garden and asked her many questions, but Maria
kept silent about the snake's secret. So her sisters fastened her
to a tree at the bottom of which was an ant's nest. Maria could not
long endure the pain of the bites of the ants and told her sisters the
truth. They let her go back home, but she could not find her husband
anywhere, and set out to look for him. She asked the birds she met
if they had seen him, but they answered that they had flown over all
the country around, for hundreds of miles, without seeing him. She
was very sorrowful, and at last, worn out with grief and weariness,
lay down to sleep under a tree which was barren of leaves, except
for three large ones at the very top.

Maria dreamed that her husband was in a house not far away and was
dangerously ill. She dreamed, also, that the leaves on the top
of the tree under which she was sleeping were the only cure for
his sickness. As soon as she awoke, she climbed the tree and got
the leaves and took them with her to the house, where she found her
husband, just as she had dreamed.

When she came to the door of the house she met a black woman whom she
asked about Don Juan, which was the prince's name. The black w