e entered his room, and saw him in this plight,
she gave a loud shriek, and ran off to tell the King.

"Call the archers," said the King. The archers came, and the King told
them to go into the Prince's room, and shoot the Snake that was coiled
about his neck. They were so clever, that they could easily do this
without hurting the Prince at all.

In came the archers in a row, fitted the arrows to the bows, the bows
were raised ready to shoot, when, on a sudden, from the Snake there
issued a voice, which spoke as follows:--

"O archers! wait, and hear me before you shoot. It is not fair to carry
out the sentence before you have heard the case. Is not this good law,
an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth? Is it not so, O King?"

"Yes," replied the King, "that is our law."

"Then," said the Snake, "I plead the law. Your son has made me a widow,
so it is fair and right that I should make his wife a widow."

"That sounds right enough," said the King, "but right and law are not
always the same thing. We had better ask somebody who knows."

They asked all the judges, but none of them could tell the law of the
matter. They shook their heads, and said they would look up all their
law-books, and see whether anything of the sort had ever happened
before, and if so, how it had been decided. That is the way judges used
to decide cases in that country, though I daresay it sounds to you a
very funny way. It looked as if they had not much sense in their own
heads, and perhaps that was true. The upshot of all was, that not a
judge would give any opinion; so the King sent messengers all over the
country-side, to see if they could find somebody somewhere who knew
something.

One of these messengers found a party of five Shepherds, who were
sitting upon a hill and trying to decide a quarrel of their own. They
gave their opinions so freely, and in language so very strong, that the
King's messenger said to himself, "Here are the men for us. Here are
five men, each with an opinion of his own, and all different."
Post-haste he scurried back to the King, and told him he had found at
last some one ready to judge the knotty point.

So the King and the Queen, and the Prince and the Princess, and all the
courtiers, got on horseback, and away they galloped to the hill
whereupon the five Shepherds were sitting, and the Snake too went with
them, coiled round the neck of the Prince.

When they got to the Shepherds' hill, the Shepherds we