In the secret chamber were found fifty wagon-loads of gold flax, and as much more was discovered buried.  The hut was razed to the ground, and the Prince and his bride and her two sisters lived happily ever after.

THE TERRIBLE HEAD

Once upon a time there was a king whose only child was a girl.  Now the King had been very anxious to have a son, or at least a grandson, to come after him, but he was told by a prophet whom he consulted that his own daughter’s son should kill him.  This news terrified him so much that he determined never to let his daughter be married, for he thought it was better to have no grandson at all than to be killed by his grandson.  He therefore called his workmen together, and bade them dig a deep round hole in the earth, and then he had a prison of brass built in the hole, and then, when it was finished, he locked up his daughter.  No man ever saw her, and she never saw even the fields and the sea, but only the sky and the sun, for there was a wide open window in the roof of the house of brass.  So the Princess would sit looking up at the sky, and watching the clouds float across, and wondering whether she should ever get out of her prison.  Now one day it seemed to her that the sky opened above her, and a great shower of shining gold fell through the window in the roof, and lay glittering in her room.  Not very long after, the Princess had a baby, a little boy, but when the King her father heard of it he was very angry and afraid, for now the child was born that should be his death.  Yet, cowardly as he was, he had not quite the heart to kill the Princess and her baby outright, but he had them put in a huge brass-bound chest and thrust out to sea, that they might either be drowned or starved, or perhaps come to a country where they would be out of his way.

So the Princess and the baby floated and drifted in the chest on the sea all day and night, but the baby was not afraid of the waves nor of the wind, for he did not know that they could hurt him, and he slept quite soundly.  And the Princess sang a song over him, and this was her song: 

  “Child, my child, how sound you sleep! 
  Though your mother’s care is deep,
  You can lie with heart at rest
  In the narrow brass-bound chest;
  In the starless night and drear
  You can sleep, and never hear
  Billows breaking, and the cry
  Of the night-wind wandering by;
  In soft purple mantle sleeping
  With your little face on mine,
  Hearing not your mother weeping
  And the breaking of the brine.”