In those days when the valiant wooers of the Tsarevna Baktriana were trying their best to win her, the brothers of little fool Ivan took it into their heads to go thither and see the fun. So they got them ready, and little fool Ivan said: "Take me with you too!"--"What, fool!" answered his brother; "sit at home and look after the fowls! What hast thou got to do with it!"--"You're right!" said he, and he went to the fowl-house and lay down there. But when his brethren had departed, little fool Ivan went into the open plain, on to the wide steppe, cried with a warrior's voice, and whistled with a heroic whistle: "Hi! thou! sivka-burka, vyeshchy kaurka! Stand before me like the leaf before the grass!" And lo! the valiant charger came running up, the earth trembled, flames shot out of his eyes, and clouds of smoke from his ears, and it said with a human voice: "How can I serve thee?" Little fool Ivan crept into one ear, washed and combed himself, and crept out of the other ear so young and handsome, that books cannot describe it, nor the eye of man bear the sight of it. And he sat him on his good horse, and struck its sturdy ribs with a whip of Samarcand silk, and his horse chafed and fumed, and rose from the earth higher than the standing woods, but lower than the moving clouds, and when it came to the large streams it swam them, and when it came to the little streams it brushed them away with its tail, and opened wide its legs for the mountains to pass between them. And little fool Ivan leaped up to the terem of the Tsarevna Baktriana, rose like a bright falcon, leaped over thirty of the two-and-thirty beams of oak, and dashed along like a passing tempest. The people roared: "Hold him, stop him!" The Tsar leaped up, the Tsaritsa cried "Oh!" The people were astonished. The brothers of little fool Ivan returned home and said to each other: "That was something like a hero; he only missed two storeys." "Why, that was I, brothers!" said little fool Ivan. "Thou indeed! Hold thy tongue, fool, and lie on the stove and eat cinder cakes!"