d got up instantly.
The first thing she did, however, was to go to the hole in the wall.
Nothing was there.

"Well, I am hardly used!" she cried aloud. "All that cleaning for the
cross old woman yesterday, and this for my trouble,--nothing for
breakfast! Not even a crust of bread! Does Mistress Ogress fancy a
princess will bear that?"

The poor foolish creature seemed to think that the work of one day
ought to serve for the next day too! But that is nowhere the way in the
whole universe. How could there be a universe in that case? And even
she never dreamed of applying the same rule to her breakfast.

"How good I was all yesterday!" she said, "and how hungry and ill used
I am to-day!"

But she would NOT be a slave, and do over again to-day what she had
done only last night! SHE didn't care about her breakfast! She might
have it no doubt if she dusted all the wretched place again, but she
was not going to do that--at least, without seeing first what lay
behind the clock!

Off she darted, and putting her hand behind the clock found the latch
of a door. It lifted, and the door opened a little way. By squeezing
hard, she managed to get behind the clock, and so through the door. But
how she stared, when instead of the open heath, she found herself on
the marble floor of a large and stately room, lighted only from above.
Its walls were strengthened by pilasters, and in every space between
was a large picture, from cornice to floor. She did not know what to
make of it. Surely she had run all round the cottage, and certainly had
seen nothing of this size near it! She forgot that she had also run
round what she took for a hay-mow, a peat-stack, and several other
things which looked of no consequence in the moonlight.

"So, then," she cried, "the old woman IS a cheat! I believe she's an
ogress, after all, and lives in a palace--though she pretends it's only
a cottage, to keep people from suspecting that she eats good little
children like me!"

Had the princess been tolerably tractable, she would, by this time,
have known a good deal about the wise woman's beautiful house, whereas
she had never till now got farther than the porch. Neither was she at
all in its innermost places now.

But, king's daughter as she was, she was not a little daunted when,
stepping forward from the recess of the door, she saw what a great
lordly hall it was. She dared hardly look to the other end, it seemed
so far off: so she began to gaze at