[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Far, far away, on a strange northern shore by the White Sea, there was
once a rich and royal city. The streets were paved with silver, the
walls were shining marble, and the church steeples were topped with gold
so they gleamed at night in the starlight like big bright moons. The
city belonged to a strong and splendid monarch whom people called The
Merciless Tsar. He lived in a palace of black marble and ivory with
terraces of turquoise mosaic, windows of pure crystal and heavy curtains
of silver cloth brocaded with brilliant designs. The Tsar had no pity
for the poor and humble; he wrapped himself in a mantle of pride, and
made subject kings and princes wait on him at table, and help him into
his coat when he went out to drive in his golden chariot behind twelve
black horses. If a poor beggar was bold and foolish enough to cry out to
him: “Alms, alms, for the love of St. Peter, O most wealthy and
wonderful!” he would order the driver to crack his whip over the
beggar’s stooping shoulders and drive the unhappy wretch before his
chariot for miles and miles. When people cheered him as he passed, he
pretended not to hear because he thought he was too great to listen to
them.
One day in winter he was driving by the frozen shore of the White Sea,
when he saw a ragged young lad fishing through a big hole in the ice.
“Who is that hideous rag-bag catching fish through the ice?” he asked
his chancellor who sat on the front seat beside the driver.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“O most wealthy and wonderful, it is the humblest of your citizens,
Hanka the Fool,” replied the chancellor.
“Take him by the collar,” ordered the Merciless Tsar, “and plunge him
through his hole in the ice. I want to see his face when he comes up
again!”
So the chancellor commanded one coachman to descend and dip poor Hanka
into the freezing water, and of course the coachman had to obey or else
have his head cut off. He grabbed The Fool by his collar and gave him a
kick from behind, and Hanka fell screaming through his hole in the thick
white ice. The Tsar declared he had never seen anything so funny in all
his life.
“Do it again,” he cried, “do it again!” Poor Hanka the Fool was nearly
frozen to death before the Tsar grew tired of him and let him go. He had
a cold for weeks after, and if his mother had not given him hot tea and
put him to bed with warm flat-irons at his feet as soon as he got home,
he probably would have died.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
A few days later, while the Tsar was sitting in state upon his throne,
feeling bored and cross and merciless, a stranger came to the city from
the distant North, driving over the frozen sea. He drove all alone in a
sleigh with three white horses whose trappings were hung with icicles
that tinkled like bells. His hair was long and flaxen, his blue eyes
were clear as stars, and he wore a flowing white cape that looked like
feathery, newly fallen snow. Of course everyone thought he would stop at
the inn near the city gate, but he drove up the highway through all the
town, and did not stop till he came to the palace of the Tsar. Then he
reined in his horses, stood up in his sleigh and called with all his
might.
“Hi, Brother Tsar! Give me a lodging for the night, for I am weary of
wayfaring. Give me a bed and a place at thy board, and fodder for my
horses, that we may rest!”
The Tsar thought the stranger must be a madman, and sent out a slave to
drive him away. But the wayfarer would not go.
“Brother Tsar!” he cried again, “Brother Tsar!” Then the Tsar jumped up
from his throne in a rage, snatched a whip from one of his coachmen, and
stepped out, in all his pride and glory, upon the terraces of turquoise
mosaic.
“Away!” he cried, “Away, or I will have thee bound and tortured!”
“What, thou wilt not grant me even a night’s lodging under thy roof?”
exclaimed the wayfarer.
The Tsar cracked his whip.
“Begone, thou mad intruder!” he shouted.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“Yes, I will be gone,” returned the stranger, seizing the reins and
jerking up his horses in great anger. “But henceforth there shall be war
between thee and me. I will sack thy city and send thee begging, O
merciless Tsar, for the affront thou hast offered me today. Know that I
am the Strength of the Storm and Ruler of the Great Ice, King Winter!”
The Tsar turned pale when he heard these words, but before he could make
any excuses, the chariot with the three white horses and the tinkling
icicles had turned about and was flying far, far away to Northward, over
the boundless stretches of the Great Ice. So the Merciless Tsar went
back into the throne-chamber and said to his chancellor, “Bah! How could
King Winter sack my city, anyway? I’d like to see him try!”
That very day it began to snow so hard that the children all through the
city could not go to school. The boys went out and shovelled the silver
pavements, but soon they had thrown so much snow into the middles of the
streets that even the strongest sleigh could not get through any more,
and the streets looked like thick, white walls between the side walks.
And still it snowed and snowed and snowed. Soon the piles in the street
became so high that the boys and even the men could not throw any more
snow on top. Then the sidewalks were all snowed up, and the steps of the
houses were covered, and the snow rose in walls against the first-story
windows.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Round the palace the piles were so great that the turquoise terraces
could no longer be shovelled, and they snowed up just like the streets.
The Tsar grew very angry when he saw the white walls rising outside his
windows, making his rooms all dark and chilly. He sent out his entire
household to shovel and sweep; from the cook to the Lord High
Chancellor, even the ladies in waiting had to go out with brooms. There
were not enough snow shovels, but he made them use coal shovels and
dust-pans, and the youngest kitchen-boy kept the window-sills cleared
with the pancake turner. But still the snow came down and down, till
there was no place to shovel it to, because it was everywhere. It rose
to the second stories and blocked all the windows of all the houses.
People in the town lived in the garrets, and even the Tsar, fuming with
anger, had to move into one of the high towers of his palace. All the
stables and barns were snowed up and people had to let the horses live
with them in their sitting rooms and put the sleighs into the halls and
spare-rooms. But the snow fell faster and faster till it was level with
the roofs and threatened to block even the dormer windows. Then they
knew that there was only one thing they could do; they had to leave the
city.
The Tsar ordered everybody to pack up as many things as the sleighs
could carry, food and clothes and cook-pots and the children’s
school-books, money and jewels, tool-chests and linen-chests, cups and
saucers, bed-clothes and brushes and tooth-powder, and flee from the
city before the snow should bury them all alive. He himself headed the
procession with ten golden sleighs, each drawn by twelve black horses.
Thus the whole population of the rich and royal city climbed out of
dormer windows or broken roofs, and drove through the snowstorm toward
the South, where the great dark forests were. When they looked back for
the last time, the snow had already covered the roofs, till only the
golden tops of the church-steeples showed above it, and a few hours
later even these disappeared. King Winter had sacked the city of the
Merciless Tsar.
Three days and nights the Tsar and his people had to drive, before they
came to a place where the snow was light enough so they could shovel it
and really reach the solid brown earth underneath. That was in the great
forests, where owls hooted, wolves howled, and foxes barked all night,
and big bears sat up on their haunches to watch the newcomers with doubt
and curiosity. The people took saws and axes, hammers and nails out of
their tool-chest and began to cut down big trees and build rude
log-cabins to live in.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“Build mine first,” said the Tsar, sitting in his sleigh and jiggling
his feet to keep warm.
So they all labored together and made him a wooden palace, with stables
for his horses and quarters for the coachmen and a big wooden terrace
for his Majesty to walk on after dinner. Then they made their own houses
close around, and a wall of brushwood, thorns and vines about the whole
settlement, to keep the wolves and bears away.
Thus they lived for months and months in great misery. Soon all their
food was eaten up, and the men had to go hunting, but they could not
kill enough game to feed such a large population. Then the Tsar became
quite terrified, for he knew that he must starve very soon if they found
no help. Several times he sent messengers to the distant shore of the
White Sea, to find out whether the snow had not melted and his city
reappeared; but everyone who came back said no, the city was not to be
found; you could not even tell where it had been.
[Illustration: At last ... he saw a tiny square of window light behind
some thick holly bushes]
“Oh, will no one tell me how I may recover my city?” cried the Tsar in
despair.
“Perhaps the Wise Woman in the forest could tell you,” replied the Lord
Chancellor. “She is King Winter’s mother—in fact they say she is the
mother of all the kings in the world. And she is said to know
everything. But it is hard to find her. You must come to her hut all
alone, some cold night under the Northern Lights, and knock three times
upon her door, calling, ‘Mother Mir! Mother Mir!’ Then perhaps she will
answer you—and perhaps she won’t.”
So the Tsar waited for a cold, bright night, when the Northern Lights
played across the starlit sky, and on that night he went out all alone
into the deep forest. He wrapped himself in his richest purple cape, set
his crown upon his head and put white ermine boots on his feet. As he
walked unattended over the frosted snow, under the great pine branches,
he looked so royal that the wolves in the forest stood at a respectful
distance and did not dare to eat him, though he was all alone. He walked
for an hour or more and wondered whether he had gone in the wrong
direction to find the Wise Woman’s hut. At last, just when he was ready
to give up the search, he saw a tiny square of window-light behind some
thick holly-bushes, and following that, he came upon the hut.
It was low and covered with heavy moss, patched with snow and edged with
black pine cones. The little window pane was a sheet of ice. (In summer
it melted away, but then the Wise Woman would not need a window pane,
for the air coming in would not be cold.) The door was made of rough
bark and had a big, twisted root tied to it for a knocker. The Tsar
picked up the root and let it fall three times: Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Mother Mir!” he called, and his voice sounded very big in the still,
black forest, “Mother Mir! Mother Mir!”
At first he thought she was not going to open, but by and by the door
swung back, all by itself, and he stooped and went into the little room.
There was a fire on the hearth; near it on a pile of leaves sat the
brown old woman, counting lily-seeds. She had hands like gnarled wood,
and long grey hair that swept the floor. But her eyes were keen and
clear and her lips were red.
“A million and three, a million and four,” she counted, dropping the
seeds into a bag. “A million and five, and six, and seven, and eight; a
million and nine red lily seeds.” Then she tied up one bag, pushed it
into a corner, and opened another with seeds of a different kind.
“Good evening to you, Mother Mir,” said the Tsar.
“Good evening, Tsar; have thy people sent thee to me?”
“Sent me!” he cried, drawing himself up so he bumped his crown on the
ceiling. “Sent me, indeed! I am the most wealthy and wonderful Tsar and
no one could keep me or send me.”
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“Except King Winter,” the Wise Woman corrected him.
The Tsar flushed with anger and pride.
“That’s why I came to thee, Mother Mir. What shall I do to recover my
buried city?”
“What thou must do, is very simple, O merciless Tsar. But if thou art
not willing to do it thou shalt never see thy city again. Thou must
repent of thy mercilessness, and become as humble as Hanka the Fool.
Thou must give all thy wealth away; and let thy last gift be to a poor
wayfarer, to atone for thy sin, that thou didst refuse a wayfarer
shelter and food in thy palace.”
The Tsar was puzzled. He had never thought how wicked he was and did not
know what it would be like to repent.
“How shall I repent, Mother Mir?”
“Go back to thy people, look into their houses, see how hungry and
unhappy they are because of thy mercilessness; perhaps it will make thee
repent.”
“But how shall I recover my city by being humble, O most Wise Woman?”
“I have told thee all thou needst to know; now go thy way and let me
count my seeds, for Spring will come and I must plant these flowers
throughout all the forests of the world and they all are numbered,
though people think they grow wild by themselves.” Then she began
counting seeds in the new bag: “One, two, three, four, five—”
The Tsar went home through the wintry forest, under the Northern Lights,
still wondering what it would feel like to repent. When he returned to
his people he did as the Wise Woman had told him—stopped at one house
after another, and looked in at the windows.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
In the first house he saw a mother who was so ill that she had to lie in
bed while the father cooked the dinner and the dog was trying to mind
the babies; and the dinner for them all was one woody turnip. The babies
were crying, the mother was crying, the dog was crying, and the father
said over his cooking-pot:
“It is all the fault of the Merciless Tsar. If he had not been so proud
and haughty and turned that strange wayfarer from his door, we would not
be starving now!”
The Tsar, watching through the window, felt a shiver run down his spine.
“I might send them a little of my wealth,” he thought, “just to stop
their crying.” Then he turned away and looked in at the next hut.
Here he saw an old man on his knees praying to St. Peter.
“O dear St. Peter,” he said, “please take me to heaven soon, for I have
such awful back-aches that I don’t want to live any more. I got them
from being whipped when I begged the Merciless Tsar for a penny!”
The Tsar felt his conscience twinge him a little. “I will send him a
doctor to rub his back,” he said. And he turned away again and went to
the third house.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Here sat a young girl, all alone, spinning thin cotton thread with
frozen fingers. All the time as she spun, the tears were running down
her face. The Tsar took off his crown, turned his cloak inside out so
one could not see the rich purple velvet, but only the lining, left his
boots outside, and went into the hut.
“I am a stranger,” he said. “Let me sit down a moment and get warm. And
tell me why thou art crying.”
“Because my lover is dead,” replied the girl, setting a chair for the
stranger. “He had his head cut off for contradicting the Tsar. And now
even if we should return to our city, even if I should be rich and
care-free, I can never, never be happy again.” And she cried harder than
ever.
“Now what could I do to help her?” thought the Tsar. But suddenly it
occurred to him that there was nothing in the world he could do that
would bring her lover back or even make her any happier again. Then he
felt so sorry that the tears ran down his cheeks, too, and he went
outside and threw himself down upon the snow for unhappiness.
“Oh, I have been so wicked!” he cried. “I have been so merciless that I
have made all my people miserable. And I can’t help the poor girl, and
it’s all my fault—I have been so awfully, awfully wicked!”
All night long, he lay in the snow, even after all the window-lights had
gone out, and no one knew he was there. When morning came and people
opened their doors to see what the weather was like, they saw their most
wealthy and wonderful Tsar, without boots or crown and with his coat
turned inside out, lying face down, on the ground. They called the Lord
Chancellor and the Lord Chamberlain and many other lords from the wooden
palace, and ran to pick him up, for they thought he must be dead or at
least fainted. But when they touched him he sat up all by himself and
looked at their surprised faces.
“Your wonderful highness, what has happened?” they cried.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“I have repented!” replied the Tsar.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Henceforth he became so humble and mild that people called him the
Merciful Tsar. He took a basket of food and carried it to the poor
people who had only one woody turnip to eat, and he went to the lame old
man with a bottle of liniment and rubbed his back till it got well, and
every day he sent some gift, a jewel or a gold-piece or a silver
thimble, or something of the sort, to comfort the girl whose lover had
been beheaded for contradicting him. He gave his wooden palace to his
lords and ladies, and moved into a tiny brown hut, moss-covered and
patched and without window-panes, way at the end of the village. No
beggar ever went empty-handed from his door; and if a little boy cut his
finger or bumped his knee, the other boys would say:
“Go to the Tsar, Aliushka, he will put a rag with ointment on it and
make it well!”
Soon he had given away so much of his wealth that he was quite the
poorest man in the village. One day just as he sat down to eat his last
piece of dry bread, a very weary old woman came to his door and said:
“Alms, alms, for the love of St. Peter, O most Merciful Tsar!”
“I have nothing but this piece of bread, but you may have it,” he
replied, and gave her his frugal dinner. The old woman sank down upon
the block of wood that was his only chair.
“Ah, but you don’t know how weary I am!” she sighed, nibbling the bread
with her toothless gums. “I have no hut to live in, no place to lay my
head, no roof to shelter me from the icy winter.”
“Thou art sleepy,” he said. “Lie down on the bed.”
As soon as she had lain down and fallen asleep, he took a piece of
charcoal from the fire place and wrote on the table, where she would
surely see it when she woke up:
“Take my hut, and my bed, and everything I own. I have moved out. There
is another piece of bread in the kitchen drawer, but it is mouldy.” Then
he left the hut, shut the door carefully so the snow should not blow in
and went to the village gate, where there was a public bench; there he
sat down.
Presently he heard a great commotion in the village; a lot of people
were coming toward the gate where he sat. In their midst walked Hanka,
the Fool, with big boots on his feet, an axe in his belt, and a
fishing-rod over his shoulder. Everybody was shouting to him:
“Good luck on thy way! Good luck, Hanka! Good luck to thee, brave
wayfarer, may all the Saints help thee against the wolves in the
forest!”
“Where art thou going, Hanka?” asked the Tsar.
“Far away to the White Sea,” replied the Fool. “We are all starving in
the village, so I am going to chop a hole through the ice and catch
fish.”
“Alas!” replied the Tsar, suddenly remembering what the Wise Mother Mir
had told him. “Thou art a wayfarer now, Hanka, and I should give thee my
last gift to atone for my old cruelty to the wayfarer who came to my
palace-gate. But I have nothing, nothing left to give, not even a
safety-pin!”
“Give me thy blessing, O most Merciful Tsar,” said Hanka the Fool.
“Surely with a Tsar’s blessing I could go safely in my long and arduous
way. It would keep off the wolves and bears and robbers that attack poor
wayfarers in the forest.”
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“Yes, I will give thee my blessing,” agreed the Tsar.
So Hanka knelt down in the snow, and the Tsar gave him a blessing for
the journey.
Hanka travelled for many days through deep and drifted snow. Over his
head the black crows flew from tree to tree, and all night when he
crouched by his brushwood fire he heard the wolves howling and the foxes
barking in the great forest. But no beast or bird or prowling robber
ever tried to hurt him; that was because he traveled with the Tsar’s
blessing on his head.
At last he came to a great field of ice and snow that he supposed was
the White Sea. He took his axe and began to chop the frozen floor,
because he was a fool and did not know that there was really solid land
under his feet. Suddenly his axe struck on something that cracked like
wood.
“What’s this?” cried Hanka, jumping back and dropping his axe. “It can’t
be ice, for it isn’t clear; it isn’t wood, for it’s too white; it isn’t
stone, for it’s too brittle; I know!” and he jumped up and down with
pleasure because he knew. “It’s ivory!”
It really was ivory. Hanka was standing on the buried city, and his axe
had broken the ivory roof of the Tsar’s palace!
He went on chopping, and digging the snow and splinters away with his
hands. At last there was such a big hole that he could jump into it.
There was a deep, dark chamber underneath, but Hanka was not afraid, so
he let himself down through the hole.
Here he stood, in the empty, snowed-up palace of the Tsar! Of course he
had never been in it before, and though it was dark and damp, and had
not been cleaned for a year, he thought it was almost too splendid to be
real. He took a match from his pocket, struck it on the wall and looked
round by its feeble flare.
“Golden chairs,” he whispered, so much impressed that he could not speak
aloud, “and velvet rugs and such bright, brocaded curtains! I have heard
people talk about these things, but I have never believed they were
real. Here is a door, and a stairway; that must lead downstairs. Oh, I
will go all through the palace and look and look!” He went softly down
the stairs, striking matches to light his way, and putting the burnt
ends into his pocket so as not to litter the floors.
The whole palace was just as the Tsar and his people had left it in
their flight. From some of the rooms they had carried off the
bed-clothes and things, but in others the beds were unmade and odd
stockings and handkerchiefs and powder-puffs lay around, that no one had
thought to take along. Hanka picked them all up and put them neatly on a
chair. Here he found a candle, too, so he could light his way without
striking matches all the time.
He went to the kitchen and found it very untidy, for the cook had left
in a hurry. He had left the cake in the oven, where it had burned to
ashes and some milk on the window sill, where it had turned to cheese
and then to something worse, so Hanka held his nose with one hand while
he washed the pitcher with the other. But in a beautiful box he
discovered some crackers that were still quite good, and on a shelf
above it was a pot of jam, so he sat down on the table-corner and ate to
his heart’s content, for he was nearly starved.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
When he could eat no more, he remembered how often he had heard people
talk about the marvels of the great throne-chamber, where the musicians
used to play and the Lord Chancellor to read in a loud voice all the
news from the Tsar’s empire, and where people were brought trembling
before the throne to be sentenced to death.
“I must see the chamber,” thought Hanka. So he prowled through all the
pantries and banquet halls and reception rooms till he came to a door of
ebony and gold, richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“This must be it,” he murmured. “If I only dared to look in! Of course,
it will be quite empty—the musicians have left it and the Lord
Chancellor is not there and the throne is deserted—but still it must be
very splendid.”
Carefully he shot back the silver bolt and the great door swung open. A
breath of very cold air struck his face, as though he had stepped into
an ice-cave. And for a moment he really thought he had. In the four
corners of the room stood four great men of ice, with folded hands,
heads bowed under the ceiling, and eyes that shone like cold December
stars. They were the four Spirits of the North: Silence, and Frost, and
Loneliness, and Northern Light, who guarded the city since the Tsar and
his people had fled. And on the Throne in the middle of the room sat
King Winter with a crown of ice upon his head and a foot-stool of snow
under his feet.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Hanka’s knees shook with terror and he dropped his candle on the mosaic
floor. The candle went out, yet the room was full of light, a still,
blue light, like the reflections in a block of ice. The four great men
did not move. But King Winter raised his hand and beckoned to the lad.
“Come here,” he said quite kindly. Hanka had fallen to his knees, and
crept upon them across the floor, holding up his hands for mercy.
“Who art thou?” demanded the King.
“Have pity, O most wonderful King! I am only Hanka the Fool.”
“Have ye come back from the great forests, thou and thy friends?”
“Sir,” replied Hanka, kissing his feet, “It is only I who have come. I
did not mean to chop through the roof of the palace. I meant to chop a
hole in the ice of the White Sea to catch some fish, for the Tsar and
his people are starving.”
“Thou hast come alone?” asked King Winter in surprise, “How is it that
wolves and bears and all the wild beasts have spared thee, and robbers
have not beaten thee to death?”
“Because, O Most Wonderful Majesty, I traveled with the Tsar’s blessing
on my head.”
King Winter sat up, and even the four Spirits looked startled.
“But since when,” asked the King, “doth the proud Merciless Tsar stoop
to give his blessing to such a beggar-lad as thee?”
“Oh,” cried Hanka, “he is not proud, indeed he isn’t! He is as humble as
I am, even I, Hanka the Fool. We call him the Merciful Tsar, for he has
turned from all his wickedness, and given his wealth away. I was a
wayfarer, and he had no other gift for me, so he gave me his blessing,
Most Wonderful King!”
At these words King Winter arose, the four spirits lifted their heads,
there was a murmur of many voices and then fairy music everywhere.
“Rise up, Hanka,” said the Ruler of the North. “My reign in the City is
over, for the Merciless Tsar has repented and become as humble as thou.
Go back to the great forests where thy Tsar and his people are, and tell
them to return hither, for King Winter and his forces have left the
city, and it belongs to the Tsar once more! In token of this, in case
thou shouldst forget what to say, take that bag of snow-stars behind the
Throne, and carry it to the Tsar.”
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
While he spoke, a whole army of spirits, snow-fairies and wind-fairies
and genie, crowned with frost-flowers, gathered from all parts of the
palace. Some came from the bedrooms, where they had been asleep in the
bureau-drawers, some from the kitchen where they had been hiding under
cups and mixing-bowls, some peeped down over the pictures on the parlor
wall, or between the curtains, or even out of the empty hall-stove. They
all joined hands in a ring and danced around Hanka, who sat bewildered
on the floor with his axe and fishing-rod, wondering where all these
creatures had been while he had explored the palace.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
“Joy, joy,” sang the spirits, “we are going home again, home to the
North Pole, to our friends, the seals and polar bears, the long
waiting-time is over, for the Merciless Tsar has repented—joy, joy,
joy!”
Then there was a tinkle of icicles outside the door, as King Winter’s
sleigh with the three white horses came jingling up. The palace doors
flew open and Hanka saw that the snow had already melted down almost to
the turquoise terraces. The king leaped into his chariot, waved his hand
to the humble fool who had followed him to the door, and away went the
royal horses, over the frozen White Sea to the distant North Pole, with
all the fairy train holding on and running behind as swiftly as the
wind.
Hanka turned back and looked at the empty throne chamber. The four great
Spirits had vanished, though he had not seen them running away with the
fairies. But where they had stood, the floor was cracked a little, and
four yellow crocus-flowers had sprung up through the stone.
Hanka felt very lonesome and frightened in the big, splendid palace. He
picked up his axe and rod and the bag of snow-stars King Winter had
ordered him to take, and ran as fast as he could through the open door,
over the terraces, through the town and gates to the open country
outside. Everywhere the snow had gone away so quickly that the second
stories of all the houses were quite free and the first stories just
appearing. Beyond the gates, he came upon great streams of water that
were running down to the White Sea, where the ice was melting and wiping
out the track of King Winter’s sleigh. Hanka turned toward the South, to
the great forests where the Tsar’s people had built their wooden
village. He sang aloud as he walked, because the warm sun was shining on
his back, and his stomach was full of crackers and jam, so he felt very
happy despite the heavy bag of snow-stars on his shoulder. If he had not
been a fool he would certainly have wondered why they were so heavy; but
he was a fool so he just carried them and did not wonder at anything.
Above him in the treetops the birds were singing as happily as he, the
air smelled sweet and warm, and in some places Mother Mir’s flowers were
peeping through the thin, wet snow.
“Why, I believe it’s going to be Spring!” said Hanka.
In the village, the Tsar was still sitting on the bench beside the gate.
The villagers came to offer him food, but he refused it, saying “You
have not enough for yourselves. I will not eat your food. Give it to
your children, good people!”
“But you will starve!” they cried. “Oh no,” replied the Tsar. “Some good
Saint will take care of me.”
And in the night, when the village was quiet and dark, the crows in the
forest flew to him and brought him some frozen berries, the squirrels
brought nuts to appease his hunger, and the fairies from the great
Forest brought partridge-eggs and reindeer milk.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
It was a beautiful sunny morning, when the villagers who stood about the
gate talking to the Tsar saw Hanka returning, with his axe and rod and a
bag over his shoulder. “Look, look,” they cried, “he is bringing a whole
bagful of fish!”
“But where do you suppose he got the bag?” said the Tsar. “He didn’t
have it when he left.”
They were not kept guessing very long. Hanka came running and shouting:
“Greetings, O Merciful Tsar, greetings from King Winter! He gave me a
message to thee, but I have forgotten it, but here is a bag of
snow-stars for thee, and thy city is all thawed out, King Winter has
gone back to the North Pole. And I went through thy palace and found
lots of crackers and jam, which I ate. I didn’t mean to steal, but there
was nobody to ask for them so I had to take them.”
The Tsar smiled and nodded.
“Thou art welcome to my crackers and jam, dear Hanka,” he said, as he
opened the bag of snow-stars, took it by the lower corners, and turned
it upside down.
Out of the bag rolled thousands and thousands of sparkling, flashing
diamonds! The people stood open-mouthed, and Hanka sat down with
surprise when he saw what he had been carrying.
“That means we may return, for King Winter’s war is over,” said the
Tsar. So all the people went back to their city on the shores of the
White Sea, where the streets were paved with silver, the walls were
shining marble, and the church steeples were topped with gold. The Tsar
sat on his throne again, but he ruled his people now with mercy and
justice, so everyone liked to be brought before him to see his mild
fatherly face.
Hanka was allowed to live in the palace all his life, and had a silver
fishing-rod, a silken line and a diamond sinker, and was permitted to
cast for gold-fish in the royal pond. King Winter came for a visit once
every year with a little snow just to remind people of his past reign;
but he always found the people ready to joke and laugh at the bad
weather he brought, for they were all happy and contented who lived in
the city of the Merciful Tsar.
[Illustration: THE END]
[Illustration: Endpapers]