Once upon a time, there was a king who had only one child, a daughter. The King really wanted a son or at least a grandson to succeed him, but a prophet told him that his daughter's son would kill him. This news scared him so much that he decided never to let his daughter marry, thinking it was better to have no grandson at all than to be killed by one. So, he ordered his workers to dig a deep round hole in the ground and build a brass prison in it. When it was finished, he locked up his daughter. No man ever saw her, and she only saw the sky and the sun through a wide open window in the roof of the brass house. The Princess would sit looking up at the sky, watching the clouds, and wondering if she would ever escape her prison.

One day, it seemed to her that the sky opened above, and a great shower of shining gold fell through the window, glittering in her room. Not long after, the Princess had a baby boy. When the King heard about it, he was very angry and afraid, for now the child was born who would be his death. Yet, cowardly as he was, he couldn't bring himself to kill the Princess and her baby outright. Instead, he had them put in a huge brass-bound chest and sent out to sea, hoping they would either drown or starve, or perhaps reach a country where they would be out of his way.

The Princess and the baby floated and drifted in the chest on the sea all day and night. The baby wasn't afraid of the waves or the wind, for he didn't know they could harm him, and he slept soundly. The Princess sang a song over him:

"Child, my child, how sound you sleep! Though your mother’s care is deep, You can lie with heart at rest In the narrow brass-bound chest; In the starless night and drear You can sleep, and never hear Billows breaking, and the cry Of the night-wind wandering by; In soft purple mantle sleeping With your little face on mine, Hearing not your mother weeping And the breaking of the brine."