Of course he felt quite hopeless . It was absurd to imagine that the apothecary 's nephew could ever marry the king 's daughter ; so he did his best to forget her , and study harder than before , till the royal proclamation suddenly filled him with hope . When he was free he no longer spent the precious moments poring over books , but , like the rest , he might have been seen wandering along the banks of the river , or diving into the stream after something that lay glistening in the clear water , but which turned out to be a white pebble or a bit of glass . And at the end he understood that it was not by the river that he would win the princess ; and , turning to his books for comfort , he studied harder than ever . There is an old proverb which says : ` Everything comes to him who knows how to wait . ' It is not all men who know hot to wait , any more than it is all men who can learn by experience ; but Gilguerillo was one of the few and instead of thinking his life wasted because he could not have the thing he wanted most , he tried to busy himself in other directions . So , one day , when he expected it least , his reward came to him . He happened to be reading a book many hundreds of years old , which told of remedies for all kinds of diseases . Most of them , he knew , were merely invented by old women , who sought to prove themselves wiser than other people ; but at length he came to something which caused him to sit up straight in his chair , and made his eyes brighten . This was the description of a balsam -- which would cure every kind of sore or wound -- distilled from a plant only to be found in a country so distant that it would take a man on foot two months to go and come back again . When I say that the book declared that the balsam could heal every sort of sore or wound , there were a few against which it was powerless , and it gave certain signs by which these might be known . This was the reason why Gilguerillo demanded to see the king 's foot before he would undertake to cure it ; and to obtain admittance he gave out that he was a shoemaker . However , the dreaded signs were absent , and his heart bounded at the thought that the princess was within his reach . Perhaps she was ; but a great deal had to be accomplished yet , and he had allowed himself a very short time in which to do it . He spared his horse only so much as was needful , yet it took him six days to reach the spot where the plant grew . A thick wood lay in front of him , and , fastening the bridle tightly to a tree , he flung himself on his hands and knees and began to hunt for the treasure . Many time he fancied it was close to him , and many times it turned out to be something else ; but , at last , when light was fading , and he had almost given up hope , he came upon a large bed of the plant , right under his feet ! Trembling with joy , he picked every scrap he could see , and placed it in his wallet . Then , mounting his horse , he galloped quickly back towards the city . It was night when he entered the gates , and the fifteen days allotted were not up till the next day .
His eyes were heavy XXXXX sleep , and his body ached with the long strain , but , without pausing to rest , he kindled a fire on is hearth , and quickly filling a pot with water , threw in the herbs and left them to boil .
against as before for like that to under with within