ade out of the best red gold,
Set thickly round on the sides and covers
With jewels of price untold.

When the day of the christening came, the bugles
Blew forth their shrillest notes;
Drums throbbed, and endless lines of soldiers
Filed past in scarlet coats.

And the fairies were there the king had bidden,
Bearing their gifts of good--
But right in the midst a strange old woman
Surly and scowling stood.

They knew her to be the old, old fairy,
All nose and eyes and ears,
Who had not peeped, till now, from her dungeon
For more than fifty years.

Angry she was to have been forgotten
Where others were guests, and to find
That neither a seat nor a dish at the banquet
To her had been assigned.

Now came the hour for the gift-bestowing;
And the fairy first in place
Touched with her wand the child and gave her
"Beauty of form and face!"

Fairy the second bade, "Be witty!"
The third said, "Never fail!"
The fourth, "Dance well!" and the fifth, "O Princess,
Sing like the nightingale!"

The sixth gave, "Joy in the heart forever!"
But before the seventh could speak,
The crooked, black old Dame came forward,
And, tapping the baby's cheek,

"You shall prick your finger upon a spindle,
And die of it!" she cried.
All trembling were the lords and ladies,
And the king and queen beside.

But the seventh fairy interrupted,
"Do not tremble nor weep!
That cruel curse I can change and soften,
And instead of death give sleep!

"But the sleep, though I do my best and kindest,
Must last for an hundred years!"
On the king's stern face was a dreadful pallor,
In the eyes of the queen were tears.

"Yet after the hundred years are vanished,"--
The fairy added beside,--
"A Prince of a noble line shall find her,
And take her for his bride."

But the king, with a hope to change the future,
Proclaimed this law to be:
That, if in all the land there was kept one spindle,
Sure death was the penalty.

The Princess grew, from her very cradle
Lovely and witty and good;
And at last, in the course of years, had blossomed
Into full sweet maidenhood.

And one day, in her father's summer palace,
As blithe as the very air,
She climbed to the top of the hi