ter and reign after me. Say,
which shall it be?'

'The princess and the kingdom,' said the young man.

And so it was.

[From Islandische Marchen.]

The Prince Who Would Seek Immortality

Once upon a time, in the very middle of the middle of a large kingdom,
there was a town, and in the town a palace, and in the palace a king.
This king had one son whom his father thought was wiser and cleverer
than any son ever was before, and indeed his father had spared no pains
to make him so. He had been very careful in choosing his tutors and
governors when he was a boy, and when he became a youth he sent him to
travel, so that he might see the ways of other people, and find that
they were often as good as his own.

It was now a year since the prince had returned home, for his father
felt that it was time that his son should learn how to rule the kingdom
which would one day be his. But during his long absence the prince
seemed to have changed his character altogether. From being a merry and
light-hearted boy, he had grown into a gloomy and thoughtful man. The
king knew of nothing that could have produced such an alteration.
He vexed himself about it from morning till night, till at length an
explanation occurred to him--the young man was in love!

Now the prince never talked about his feelings--for the matter of that
he scarcely talked at all; and the father knew that if he was to come to
the bottom of the prince's dismal face, he would have to begin. So one
day, after dinner, he took his son by the arm and led him into another
room, hung entirely with the pictures of beautiful maidens, each one
more lovely than the other.

'My dear boy,' he said, 'you are very sad; perhaps after all your
wanderings it is dull for you here all alone with me. It would be much
better if you would marry, and I have collected here the portraits
of the most beautiful women in the world of a rank equal to your own.
Choose which among them you would like for a wife, and I will send an
embassy to her father to ask for her hand.'

'Alas! your Majesty,' answered the prince, 'it is not love or marriage
that makes me so gloomy; but the thought, which haunts me day and night,
that all men, even kings, must die. Never shall I be happy again till
I have found a kingdom where death is unknown. And I have determined to
give myself no rest till I have discovered the Land of Immortality.

The old king heard him with dismay; things were worse than he