bered that
there was still one remaining friend, and he cried with dying accents:

"Wasp's nest, Wasp's nest, make a sally,
Or Drakestail nevermore may rally."

Hereupon the scene changes.

"Bs, bs, bayonet them!" The brave Wasp's-nest rushes out with all his
wasps. They threw themselves on the infuriated king and his ministers,
and stung them so fiercely in the face that they lost their heads, and
not knowing where to hide themselves they all jumped pell-mell from the
window and broke their necks on the pavement.

Behold Drakestail much astonished, all alone in the big saloon and
master of the field. He could not get over it.

Nevertheless, he remembered shortly what he had come for to the palace,
and improving the occasion, he set to work to hunt for his dear money.
But in vain he rummaged in all the drawers; he found nothing; all had
been spent.

And ferreting thus from room to room he came at last to the one with the
throne in it, and feeling fatigued, he sat himself down on it to think
over his adventure. In the meanwhile the people had found their king and
his ministers with their feet in the air on the pavement, and they had
gone into the palace to know how it had occurred. On entering the
throne-room, when the crowd saw that there was already someone on the
royal seat, they broke out in cries of surprise and joy:

"The King is dead, long live the King!
Heaven has sent us down this thing."

Drakestail, who was no longer surprised at anything, received the
acclamations of the people as if he had never done anything else all his
life.

A few of them certainly murmured that a Drakestail would make a fine
king; those who knew him replied that a knowing Drakestail was a more
worthy king than a spendthrift like him who was lying on the pavement.
In short, they ran and took the crown off the head of the deceased, and
placed it on that of Drakestail, whom it fitted like wax.

Thus he became king.

"And now," said he after the ceremony, "ladies and gentlemen, let's go
to supper. I am so hungry!"

167

The story of "Beauty and the Beast," while very
old in its ruder forms, is known to us in a
fine version which comes from the middle of the
eighteenth century. Madame de Villeneuve, a
French writer of some note and a follower of
Perrault in the field of the fairy tale,
published in 1740 a collection of stories