“Your wonderful highness, what has happened?” they cried.
Henceforth he became so humble and mild that people called him the Merciful Tsar. He took a basket of food and carried it to the poor people who had only one woody turnip to eat, and he went to the lame old man with a bottle of liniment and rubbed his back till it got well, and every day he sent some gift, a jewel or a gold-piece or a silver thimble, or something of the sort, to comfort the girl whose lover had been beheaded for contradicting him. He gave his wooden palace to his lords and ladies, and moved into a tiny brown hut, moss-covered and patched and without window-panes, way at the end of the village. No beggar ever went empty-handed from his door; and if a little boy cut his finger or bumped his knee, the other boys would say:
“Go to the Tsar, Aliushka, he will put a rag with ointment on it and make it well!”
Soon he had given away so much of his wealth that he was quite the poorest man in the village. One day just as he sat down to eat his last piece of dry bread, a very weary old woman came to his door and said:
“Alms, alms, for the love of St. Peter, O most Merciful Tsar!”
“I have nothing but this piece of bread, but you may have it,” he replied, and gave her his frugal dinner. The old woman sank down upon the block of wood that was his only chair.
“Ah, but you don’t know how weary I am!” she sighed, nibbling the bread with her toothless gums. “I have no hut to live in, no place to lay my head, no roof to shelter me from the icy winter.”
“Thou art sleepy,” he said. “Lie down on the bed.”
As soon as she had lain down and fallen asleep, he took a piece of charcoal from the fire place and wrote on the table, where she would surely see it when she woke up:
“Take my hut, and my bed, and everything I own. I have moved out. There is another piece of bread in the kitchen drawer, but it is mouldy.” Then he left the hut, shut the door carefully so the snow should not blow in and went to the village gate, where there was a public bench; there he sat down.
Presently he heard a great commotion in the village; a lot of people were coming toward the gate where he sat. In their midst walked Hanka, the Fool, with big boots on his feet, an axe in his belt, and a fishing-rod over his shoulder. Everybody was shouting to him: