c
with the utmost skill.

It was now the turn of the aged fairy. Shaking her head, in token of
spite rather than of infirmity, she declared that the princess should
prick her hand with a spindle, and die of it. A shudder ran through the
company at this terrible gift. All eyes were filled with tears.

But at this moment the young fairy stepped forth from behind the
tapestry.

'Take comfort, your Majesties,' she cried in a loud voice; 'your
daughter shall not die. My power, it is true, is not enough to undo all
that my aged kinswoman has decreed: the princess will indeed prick her
hand with a spindle. But instead of dying she shall merely fall into
a profound slumber that will last a hundred years. At the end of that
time a king's son shall come to awaken her.'

[Illustration: '_The king ... at once published an edict_']

The king, in an attempt to avert the unhappy doom pronounced by the old
fairy, at once published an edict forbidding all persons, under pain of
death, to use a spinning-wheel or keep a spindle in the house.

At the end of fifteen or sixteen years the king and queen happened one
day to be away, on pleasure bent. The princess was running about the
castle, and going upstairs from room to room she came at length to a
garret at the top of a tower, where an old serving-woman sat alone with
her distaff, spinning. This good woman had never heard speak of the
king's proclamation forbidding the use of spinning-wheels.

'What are you doing, my good woman?' asked the princess.

'I am spinning, my pretty child,' replied the dame, not knowing who she
was.

'Oh, what fun!' rejoined the princess; 'how do you do it? Let me try and
see if I can do it equally well.'

Partly because she was too hasty, partly because she was a little
heedless, but also because the fairy decree had ordained it, no sooner
had she seized the spindle than she pricked her hand and fell down in a
swoon.

In great alarm the good dame cried out for help. People came running
from every quarter to the princess. They threw water on her face, chafed
her with their hands, and rubbed her temples with the royal essence of
Hungary. But nothing would restore her.

Then the king, who had been brought upstairs by the commotion,
remembered the fairy prophecy. Feeling certain that what had happened
was inevitable, since the fairies had decreed it, he gave orders that
the princess should be placed in the finest apartment in the palace,
upon a bed