r nightcap looking out of the window too.

So they lived happily ever after.

TATTERCOATS

In a great Palace by the sea there once dwelt a very rich old lord, who
had neither wife nor children living, only one little granddaughter,
whose face he had never seen in all her life. He hated her bitterly,
because at her birth his favourite daughter died; and when the old nurse
brought him the baby he swore that it might live or die as it liked, but
he would never look on its face as long as it lived.

So he turned his back, and sat by his window looking out over the sea,
and weeping great tears for his lost daughter, till his white hair and
beard grew down over his shoulders and twined round his chair and crept
into the chinks of the floor, and his tears, dropping on to the
window-ledge, wore a channel through the stone, and ran away in a little
river to the great sea. Meanwhile, his granddaughter grew up with no one
to care for her, or clothe her; only the old nurse, when no one was by,
would sometimes give her a dish of scraps from the kitchen, or a torn
petticoat from the rag-bag; while the other servants of the palace would
drive her from the house with blows and mocking words, calling her
"Tattercoats," and pointing to her bare feet and shoulders, till she ran
away, crying, to hide among the bushes.

So she grew up, with little to eat or to wear, spending her days out of
doors, her only companion a crippled gooseherd, who fed his flock of
geese on the common. And this gooseherd was a queer, merry little chap,
and when she was hungry, or cold, or tired, he would play to her so
gaily on his little pipe, that she forgot all her troubles, and would
fall to dancing with his flock of noisy geese for partners.

Now one day people told each other that the King was travelling through
the land, and was to give a great ball to all the lords and ladies of
the country in the town near by, and that the Prince, his only son, was
to choose a wife from amongst the maidens in the company. In due time
one of the royal invitations to the ball was brought to the Palace by
the sea, and the servants carried it up to the old lord, who still sat
by his window, wrapped in his long white hair and weeping into the
little river that was fed by his tears.

But when he heard the King's command, he dried his eyes and bade them
bring shears to cut him loose, for his hair had bound him a fast
prisoner, and he could not move. And then he se