The legend of the cowherd and the princess tells how a son who follows his father's last wishes to the letter can be rewarded.
There was a man who made his living tending the cows of a rich landowner.
When his father died, he respected his last wishes, although they seemed very strange to him.
He buried the body instead of burning it as was the custom, and for a whole year he came to bloom the grave.
When the year was up, he dug up his father's skull, washed it, and dragged it along a string.
When it got stuck between two rocks, he left it there and fell asleep beside it.
In the morning, he discovered a most bizarre creature caught in the skull trap, a small animal with four ears and five eyes.
The man tried to feed the beast, but it refused to eat anything until the evening when it began to gobble up the embers of the fire.
The next morning, when the cowherd woke up, he saw that his animal's droppings were made of gold.
Time passed, the man accumulated nuggets at the bottom of his garden, and one day the king and his daughter passed by his house.
The cowherd immediately fell in love with the princess and asked his boss to go to the king to ask for her hand in marriage on his behalf.
He was so insistent that the boss agreed.
The ruler could not believe that a simple cowherd could desire the princess, but he decided to give her a test, however impossible it was: to build a golden bridge in front of the palace.
On discovering this answer, our man took all his gold reserves to a goldsmith to be melted down into bricks.
When the bricks were ready, the cowherd spent a whole night building the bridge, and in the morning the king had only to keep his word.
End
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