As soon as he came home to the castle he called his chief forester to him. “Here,” says he, “take this baby and do thus and so with it, and when you have killed it bring its heart to me, that I may know that you have really done as you have been told.” So off marched the forester with the baby; but on his way he stopped at home, and there was his good wife working about the house. “Well, Henry,” said she, “what do you do with the baby?” “Oh!” said he, “I am just taking it off to the forest to do thus and so with it.” “Come,” said she, “it would be a pity to harm the little innocent, and to have its blood on your hands. Yonder hangs the rabbit that you shot this morning, and its heart will please the king just as well as the other.” Thus the wife talked, and the end of the business was that she and the man smeared a basket all over with pitch and set the baby adrift in it on the river, and the king was just as well satisfied with the rabbit’s heart as he would have been with the baby’s. But the basket with the baby in it drifted on and on down the river, until it lodged at last among the high reeds that stood along the bank. By and by there came a great she-bear to the water to drink, and there she found it. Now the huntsmen in the forest had robbed the she-bear of her cubs, so that her heart yearned over the little baby, and she carried it home with her to fill the place of her own young ones. There the baby throve until he grew to a great strong lad, and as he had fed upon nothing but bear’s milk for all that time, he was ten times stronger than the strongest man in the land. One day, as he was walking through the forest, he came across a woodman chopping the trees into billets of wood, and that was the first time he had ever seen a body like himself. Back he went to the bear as fast as he could travel, and told her what he had seen. “That,” said the bear, “is the most wicked and most cruel of all the beasts.” [Illustration: The Baby drifts in the basket down the river to the reeds beside the bank where the she-bear finds it. ):(] “Yes,” says the lad, “that may be so, all the same I love beasts like that as I love the food I eat, and I long for nothing so much as to go out into the wide world, where I may find others of the same kind.” At this the bear saw very well how the geese flew, and that the lad would soon be flitting. “See,” said she, “if you must go out into the wide world you must. But you will be wanting help before long; for the ways of the world are not peaceful and simple as they are here in the woods, and before you have lived there long you will have more needs than there are flies in summer. See, here is a little crooked horn, and when your wants grow many, just come to the forest and blow a blast on it, and I will not be too far away to help you.”