oys, he passed hours
poring over books, and because he was timid and liked to be alone he
was held by everyone to be a little mad. Therefore, when it became known
that he had promised to cure the king's foot, and had ridden away--no
one knew where--a roar of laughter and mockery rang through the town,
and jeers and scoffing words were sent after him.

But if they had only known what were Gilguerillo's thoughts they would
have thought him madder than ever.

The real truth was that, on the morning when the princess had walked
through the streets before making holiday on the river Gilguerillo had
seen her from his window, and had straightway fallen in love with her.
Of course he felt quite hopeless. It was absurd to imagine that the
apothecary's nephew could ever marry the king's daughter; so he did
his best to forget her, and study harder than before, till the royal
proclamation suddenly filled him with hope. When he was free he no
longer spent the precious moments poring over books, but, like the
rest, he might have been seen wandering along the banks of the river, or
diving into the stream after something that lay glistening in the clear
water, but which turned out to be a white pebble or a bit of glass.

And at the end he understood that it was not by the river that he would
win the princess; and, turning to his books for comfort, he studied
harder than ever.

There is an old proverb which says: 'Everything comes to him who knows
how to wait.' It is not all men who know hot to wait, any more than it
is all men who can learn by experience; but Gilguerillo was one of the
few and instead of thinking his life wasted because he could not have
the thing he wanted most, he tried to busy himself in other directions.
So, one day, when he expected it least, his reward came to him.

He happened to be reading a book many hundreds of years old, which
told of remedies for all kinds of diseases. Most of them, he knew, were
merely invented by old women, who sought to prove themselves wiser than
other people; but at length he came to something which caused him to
sit up straight in his chair, and made his eyes brighten. This was
the description of a balsam--which would cure every kind of sore or
wound--distilled from a plant only to be found in a country so distant
that it would take a man on foot two months to go and come back again.

When I say that the book declared that the balsam could heal every sort
of sore or wound, there