"I
and my jewels are not good enough for the Princess Goldenlocks!" And
the King cried and cried, just as if he had not been grown up.

All the people in the court were greatly disturbed because the
ambassador had failed in his mission. They felt themselves injured
to think that Goldenlocks would not marry their King. There was one
courtier, named Charming, who felt especially bad, for he was very fond
of the King. He even said one day that he was certain that if the King
had only let him go to Goldenlocks, she would have consented to a royal
marriage.

Now, there were in that court some very jealous men, who thought that
Charming was altogether too great a favorite with the King. When they
heard him say that he could have won Goldenlocks for his master, they
got together and agreed to tell the King that Charming was making silly
boasts.

"Your majesty," one of them said, "Charming told us that if you had let
him go to Goldenlocks she would never have refused to marry you. He
thinks that he is so attractive that the Princess would have fallen in
love with him immediately, and would have consented to go anywhere he
wished with him."

"Villain!" the King exclaimed. "And I thought he was my friend."

Of course, you and I know that if the King himself had been any sort of
a friend he would never have doubted the good faith of Charming just
because someone else spoke evil of him. But what did the King do but
order Charming put into a dungeon and given no food or water, so that
the poor fellow should die of hunger!

Poor Charming was bewildered when the King's guards came to carry him
off to prison. He could not imagine why the King had turned against him
in this unfair way. It made him miserable enough to be in a cold, damp
cell, with no food to eat, and no water to drink except that from a
little stream which flowed through the cell. He had no bed--just a
dirty pile of straw. But all these discomforts were as nothing to the
worry he had as to why the King, whom he had always liked, had treated
him so unjustly. He used to talk to himself about it. One day he said,
as he had thought dozens of times before:

"What have I done that my kindest friend, to whom I have always been
faithful, should have turned against me and left me to die in this
prison cell?"

As luck would have it, the King himself was passing by the dungeon
where Charming was confined when he spoke these words, and the King
heard them. Perhaps the Ki