King Midas and the Golden Touch

• 4 minute read
• Ages 6-10
• Moral Stories

King Midas had more gold than any king alive, and he thought about it constantly.

He had a room under the palace where he kept it, and he went down there most evenings and ran the coins through his hands and looked at them, and it was the happiest part of his day.

He had a daughter too. Her name was Marigold, and she followed him everywhere, and he loved her more than anything except one thing.

The wish

One night a stranger appeared in the treasure room, glowing faintly, and said that Midas had been kind to a friend of his and could have one wish.

Midas did not have to think.

"Let everything I touch turn to gold."

"Are you certain?"

"Completely."

"Then it is done," said the stranger. "From sunrise."

The best morning of his life

Midas woke early and touched the bedpost. It went stiff and yellow under his hand.

He laughed out loud. He touched the curtains and they hung in golden folds. He touched a chair, a book, the door handle, a rose in the garden — and each one turned, shining, perfect and heavy.

He went in to breakfast in the best mood of his life.

He picked up a piece of bread and it turned to gold in his fingers, and he could not bite it.

He reached for water and the cup turned, and the water in it turned, and he sat there holding a solid gold cup with a solid gold disc inside where the water had been.

He tried a grape. Gold.

He sat at a full table and understood that he could not eat anything at all, ever again.

Marigold

And then his daughter came into the room.

She had been out in the garden and she was crying, because her favourite rose bush had gone hard and yellow and dead in the night, and she did not understand why.

She ran to him and put her arms round his neck.

Midas did not have time to move.

She was gold before she had finished speaking. Gold hair, gold face, gold arms round his neck, still warm for a moment, and then not warm at all.

The house was completely silent.

The river

He was still sitting there hours later when the stranger came back.

"Are you happy, Midas?"

Midas could not speak for a while.

"Take it back," he said. "Take all of it. Take every coin in the palace. Just take it back."

The stranger told him to go to the river at the edge of the city and wash his hands in it, and then to carry water back in a jar and pour it over anything he wished to restore.

Midas ran. He was an old man and he ran the whole way.

He washed his hands in the river and the gold went out of them and into the sand, where it is still found today. He filled a jar and carried it back and poured it over his daughter, and she coughed and shivered and asked him why he was crying.

And after that he did not go down to the treasure room in the evenings any more.