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Updated: June 3, 2025
Day and night did Isal sit by his side and hold his hand while he gazed in her face, too weak to speak. Slowly the pain and the sorrow left his face, and instead came a smile of holy joy which never left him. For seven days and seven nights did Isal sit beside him. Then he died, and she, just able to reach her old cot, lay down upon it, weak and suffering.
When it was nightfall, the Phoenix came majestically down from his high perch, and hovering for a few minutes about the King and Queen, gave them a great deal of good advice which they could not understand, and then sailed grandly away, joined the Tufters in the woods, and flew back to his eyrie, far off. In the Palace lived the Prince and his beautiful Queen, the good Isal. The Sacrifice.
And Isal loved the Prince and was very happy in the palace where she had everything she could desire; but often in the five years did she remember the woodman's hut on the bank of the great blue river where she had spent her childhood; often she thought of her father living there alone, reft of his little daughter, the one comfort of his life.
One evening after the sun was down, Isal was playing on the river bank when she saw a limb of a tree floating down the river toward her; as it came near, the current of the stream brought it by the bank, and Isal, reaching out into the water, took hold of a twig and drew to her the very bough which had floated for hundred of miles down the river, with the Old Brown Coat snugly hid among the twigs and leaves.
They waited still on the old bird and brought him all the information they could find about the affairs of the world. "I wonder how the Old Brown Coat does," said the Tufter who had once been rash, as they all stood round the Phoenix one night. "That was a very grand event we brought about the marriage of the Prince with Isal.
The Prince and Isal had now been married nearly five years, so that Isal was then eighteen years old and even more beautiful than when the prince found her in the garden. The royal family was at first displeased that the Prince should marry a peasant maiden, but Isal was so good that one could not help loving her, and soon every one said that there never had been such a Queen in Percan.
Meanwhile Isal stayed by the Phoenix and the three Tufters, who kept very good watch over her.
Every morning when Isal awoke she was surprised to find herself in a new place; always with the Old Brown Coat and the strange birds; they only travelled in the night time when Isal was asleep; in the day time they rested on account of the Phoenix. At last one morning, an hour before sunrise, they came to the Palace and alighted in the garden just below the Prince's window.
But the Prince comforted her, and told her that he would send messengers who should travel over the whole country to find her father and bring her word of him. So the messengers were sent out in search of the woodman. But the Prince did not know nor Isal, that he lived so far away and so hidden that it would not be possible to reach him before he died.
I was passing the very spot, so I just flew in for a moment, and there I saw the woodman, her father, lying upon his bed very sick. There was no one with him." "How sad!" said Rosedrop, mournfully. "The cot from which we took Isal," added the Tufter, "was there still, just as we left it, in precisely the same spot." "How remarkable!" said the rash Tufter, who had become prudent.
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