hands to the people with
ostentatious ceremony.

"Now, good people," he said, without rising from his seat, "you are
about to see the finest, rarest, and most wonderful exhibition of the
conjuring art ever known!"

"Stop!" cried a woman's voice from the crowd, and a young girl rushed
wildly forward from the people, who had been trying to hold her back.

"I impeach you before all these witnesses!" she cried, seizing him by
the hand. "See justice done, good people. I impeach you, pedlar. Where's
the ring--my mother's ring--which you stole on Midsummer's day in the
castle?"

"Good people," said the pedlar, pulling his red cap over his face, and
speaking in a mild, fawning voice, "I hope you'll protect me. I hope you
won't see me insulted."

"My ring, my ring!" cried Hulda; "he wore it on his finger but now!"

"Show your hand like a man!" said the people. "If the lady says falsely,
can't you face her and tell her so? Never hold it down so cowardly!"

The pedlar had tucked his feet under him, and when the people cried out
to him to let the rings on his hand be seen, he had already burrowed
with them up to his knees in the earth.

[Illustration: "THE PEDLAR HAD NOW SUNK UP TO HIS WAIST."]

"Oh, he will go down into the earth!" cried Hulda. "But I will not let
go! Pedlar, pedlar, it is useless! If I follow you before the Lizard,
your mistress, I will not let go!"

The pedlar turned his terrified, cowardly eyes upon Hulda, and sank
lower and lower. The people were too frightened to move.

"Stop, child," cried her mother. "Oh, he will go down and drag thee with
him."

But Hulda would not and could not let go. The pedlar had now sunk up to
his waist. Her mother wrung her hands, and in an instant the earth
closed upon them both, and, after falling in the dark down a steep
abyss, they found themselves, not at all the worse, standing in a dimly
lighted cave with a large table in it piled with mouldy books. Behind
the table was a smooth and perfectly round hole in the wall about the
size of a cartwheel.

Hulda looked that way, and saw how intensely dark it was through this
hole, and she was wondering where it led to when an enormous green
Lizard put its head through into the cave, and gazed at her with its
great brown eyes.

"What is thy demand, fine child of the daylight?" said the Lizard.

"Princess," replied Hulda, "I demand that this thy servant should give
up to me a ring which he stole in my father's castle w