“You shall have them,” said the Demon; and thereupon he began snipping
in the air, and cutting most wonderful patterns of silks and satins out
of nothing at all, and the little Tailor sat and gaped and stared. Then
the Demon began to drive the needle like a spark of fire--the like was
never seen in all the seven kingdoms, for the clothes seemed to make
themselves.
At last, at the end of a little while, the Demon stood up and brushed
his hands. “They are done,” said he, and thereupon he instantly
vanished. But the Tailor cared little for that, for upon the bench there
lay such a suit of clothes of silk and satin stuff, sewed with threads
of gold and silver and set with jewels, as the eyes of man never saw
before; and the Tailor packed them up and marched off with them himself
to the prime-minister.
The prime-minister wore the clothes to court that very day, and before
evening they were the talk of the town. All the world ran to the Tailor
and ordered clothes of him, and his fortune was made. Every day the
Demon created new suits of clothes out of nothing at all, so that the
Tailor grew as rich as a Jew, and held his head up in the world.
As time went along he laid heavier and heavier tasks upon the Demon’s
back, and demanded of him more and more; but all the while the Demon
kept his own counsel, and said never a word.
One morning, as the Tailor sat in his shop window taking the world
easy--for he had little or nothing to do now--he heard a great hubbub in
the street below, and when he looked down he saw that it was the king’s
daughter passing by. It was the first time that the Tailor had seen her,
and when he saw her his heart stood still within him, and then began
fluttering like a little bird, for one so beautiful was not to be met
with in the four corners of the world. Then she was gone.
All that day the little Tailor could do nothing but sit and think of the
princess, and the next morning when the Demon came he was thinking of
her still.
“What hast thou for me to do to-day?” said the Demon, as he always said
of a morning.
The little Tailor was waiting for the question.
“I would like you,” said he, “to send to the king’s palace, and to ask
him to let me have his daughter for my wife.”
“Thou shalt have thy desire,” said the Demon. Thereupon he smote his
hands together like a clap of thunder, and instantly the walls of the
room clove asunder, and there came out four-and-twenty handsome youths,
clad in cloth of gold and silver. After these four-and-twenty there came
another one who was the chief of them all, and before whom, splendid as
they were, the four-and-twenty paled like stars in daylight. “Go to the
king’s palace,” said the Demon to that one, “and deliver this message:
The Tailor of Tailors, the Master of Masters, and One Greater than a
King asks for his daughter to wife.”
“To hear is to obey,” said the other, and bowed his forehead to the
earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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