When he had ended he lay quite still, and the Prince kissed his closed eyelids and went softly out of the room. "Now I know," he said to himself; "now at last!" And he came through the wood and knocked at his foster-mother's door. "Other mother," he said to her, "give me a kiss for each of my sisters, for now I am going out into the world to find them, to be rid of the sorrows in my heart." "They can never be found!" she cried, but she kissed him nine times. "And this," she said, "was Monica, and this was Ponica, and this was Veronica," and so she went over every name. "But now they are only names!" she wept, as she let him go. He went along, and he went along, mile after[18] mile. "Where may you be going to, fair sir?" asked an old peasant, at whose cabin the Prince sought shelter when night came to the first day of his wanderings. "Truly," answered the Prince, "I do not know how far or whither I need to go; but I have a finger-post in my heart that keeps pointing me." [18] So that night he stayed there, and the next day he went on. "Where to so fast?" asked a woodcutter when the second night found him in the thickest and loneliest parts of the forest. "Here the night is so dark and the way so dangerous, one like you should not go alone." "Nay, I know nothing," said the Prince, "only I feel like a weather-cock in a wind that keeps turning me to its will!" After many days he came to a small long valley rich in woods and water-courses, but no road ran through it. More and more it seemed like the world's end, a place unknown, or forgotten of its old inhabitants. Just at the end of the valley, where the woods opened into clear slopes and hollows towards the west, he saw before him, low and overgrown, the walls of a little tumble-down grange. "There," he said to himself when he saw it, "I can find shelter for to-night. Never have I felt so tired before, or such a pain at my heart!" Before long he came to a little gate, and a winding path that led in among lawns and trees to the door of an old house. The house seemed as if it had been once lived in, but there was no sign of any[19] life about it now. He pushed open the door, and suddenly there was a sharp rustling of feathers, and nine white peahens rose up from the ground and flew out of the window into the garden. [19]
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