“Open the window and let me listen to the birds.”

The servants obeyed and Ivan listened for a while.  Then he said: 

“Show me to your sovereign king.”

When he reached the room where the king sat on a high, rich chair, he bowed and said: 

“There are three crows, a father crow, a mother crow, and a son crow.  The trouble is that they desire to obtain thy royal decision as to whether the son crow must follow his father crow or his mother crow.”

The king answered:  “The son crow must follow the father crow.”

As soon as the king announced his royal decision the crow father with the crow son went one way and the crow mother disappeared the other way, and no one has heard the noisy birds since.  The king gave one-half of his kingdom and his youngest korolevna to Ivan, and a happy life began for him.

In the meantime his father, the rich merchant, lost his wife and by and by his fortune also.  There was no one left to take care of him, and the old man went begging under the windows of charitable people.  He went from one window to another, from one village to another, from one town to another, and one bright day he came to the palace where Ivan lived, begging humbly for charity.  Ivan saw him and recognized him, ordered him to come inside, and gave him food to eat and also supplied him with good clothes, asking questions: 

[Illustration:  “The old man went begging from town to town”]

“Dear old man, what can I do for thee?” he said.

“If thou art so very good,” answered the poor father, without knowing that he was speaking to his own son, “let me remain here and serve thee among thy faithful servants.”

“Dear, dear father!” exclaimed Ivan, “thou didst doubt the true song of the nightingale, and now thou seest that our fate was to meet according to the predictions of long ago.”

The old man was frightened and knelt before his son, but his Ivan remained the same good son as before, took his father lovingly into his arms, and together they wept over their sorrow.

Several days passed by and the old father felt courage to ask his son, the korolevitch: 

“Tell me, my son, how was it that thou didst not perish in the boat?”

Ivan Korolevitch laughed gayly.

“I presume,” he answered, “that it was not my fate to perish at the bottom of the wide sea, but my fate was to marry the korolevna, my beautiful wife, and to sweeten the old age of my dear father.”

[Illustration]

IVANOUSHKA THE SIMPLETON

[Illustration] In a kingdom far away from our country, there was a town over which ruled the Tsar Pea with his Tsaritza Carrot.  He had many wise statesmen, wealthy princes, strong, powerful warriors, and also simple soldiers, a hundred thousand, less one man.  In that town lived all kinds of people:  honest, bearded merchants, keen and open-handed rascals, German tradesmen, lovely maidens, Russian drunkards; and in the suburbs all around, the peasants tilled the soil, sowed the wheat, ground the flour, traded in the markets, and spent the money in drink.