Gilguerillo bowed , and turned to leave the palace , followed by the jeers and scoffs of everyone he met . But he paid no heed , for he had got what he wanted . He waited in front of the gates till a magnificent horse was led up to him , and vaulting into the saddle with an ease which rather surprised the attendant , rode quickly out of the town amidst the jests of the assembled crowd , who had heard of his audacious proposal . And while he is on his way let us pause for a moment and tell who he is . Both father and mother had died before the boy was six years old ; and he had lived for many years with his uncle , whose life had been passed in the study of chemistry . He could leave no money to his nephew , as he had a son of his own ; but he taught him all he knew , and at his dead Gilguerillo entered an office , where he worked for many hours daily . In his spare time , instead of playing with the other boys , he passed hours poring over books , and because he was timid and liked to be alone he was held by everyone to be a little mad . Therefore , when it became known that he had promised to cure the king 's foot , and had ridden away -- no one knew where -- a roar of laughter and mockery rang through the town , and jeers and scoffing words were sent after him . But if they had only known what were Gilguerillo 's thoughts they would have thought him madder than ever . The real truth was that , on the morning when the princess had walked through the streets before making holiday on the river Gilguerillo had seen her from his window , and had straightway fallen in love with her . 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 XXXXX which these might be known .
Of along by if into like on over through with