26
RUSSIAN WONDER TALES
ness, they went aboard the ships and sailed back to Tzar Saltan's realm. He summoned his Ministers and Boyars, his Princes and Judges, and they condemned his evil wife, and she and her sister were put into a chest barred and bound with iron, and the chest was thrown into the sea-ocean. But God did not protect them as he had protected the Tzaritza and her son, for they sank at once into the lowest abyss and were drowned.
But Tzar Saltan and Tzaritza Marfa, with the seven Tzareviches, lived always together in bright-faced joy, and increased in all good things. And Tzaritza Marfa was as beautiful in her old age as she had been in her youth.
