Let us start with the king who went to the forest. He was said to be very, very powerful and he had a wife and a son.
One day he summoned his wife and disclosed to her that he was about to take leave from them and that from now on the solitude of the wood was his appropriate place of action.

“Seen from the point of outer royal rule - with all its obligations - it looked as if he shunned his responsibilities, leaving his wife and his little son to a quite uncertain destiny.
The thinking of the king, however, was quite different if not the opposite; but at this point of time he could not talk to anyone about it lest the success of his plan would have been jeopardized.

“He retired into the solitude of the forest in order to bring about from here, from the silence of retirement, a new heyday for his kingdom.
The king was a wise man and had unusual abilities but he never displayed them in his environment - as the truly wise never do either.

“The power of the king had its expression in his wonder-well which gushed forth in the palace-court.
But in the course of time everybody in the country had grown used to this invigorating source, and nobody realized anymore that the well was related to the king, that its auspicious effect sprang from the power of the king just as wisdom naturally flows from the mouth of a sage.