, "you should send for a gardener
whose father and grandfather have been gardeners before him, and very
soon your garden will be full of green grass and gay flowers, and you
will enjoy its delicious fruit."

So the King sent messengers to every town, village, and hamlet in his
dominions, to look for a gardener whose forefathers had been gardeners
also, and after forty days one was found.

"Come with us and be gardener to the King," they said to him.

"How can I go to the King," said the gardener, "a poor wretch like me?"

"That is of no consequence," they answered. "Here are new clothes for
you and your family."

"But I owe money to several people."

"We will pay your debts," they said.

So the gardener allowed himself to be persuaded, and went away with
the messengers, taking his wife and his son with him; and the King,
delighted to have found a real gardener, entrusted him with the care
of his garden. The man found no difficulty in making the royal garden
produce flowers and fruit, and at the end of a year the park was not
like the same place, and the King showered gifts upon his new servant.

The gardener, as you have heard already, had a son, who was a very
handsome young man, with most agreeable manners, and every day he
carried the best fruit of the garden to the King, and all the prettiest
flowers to his daughter. Now this princess was wonderfully pretty and
was just sixteen years old, and the King was beginning to think it was
time that she should be married.

"My dear child," said he, "you are of an age to take a husband,
therefore I am thinking of marrying you to the son of my prime minister.

"Father," replied the Princess, "I will never marry the son of the
minister."

"Why not?" asked the King.

"Because I love the gardener's son," answered the Princess.

On hearing this the King was at first very angry, and then he wept and
sighed, and declared that such a husband was not worthy of his daughter;
but the young Princess was not to be turned from her resolution to marry
the gardener's son.

Then the King consulted his ministers. "This is what you must do," they
said. "To get rid of the gardener you must send both suitors to a
very distant country, and the one who returns first shall marry your
daughter."

The King followed this advice, and the minister's son was presented with
a splendid horse and a purse full of gold pieces, while the gardener's
son had only an old lame horse and a purse f