ueen Pet, quite grandly; and she was brought down to the great Council
Chamber.

"Your Majesty has had too much plum-pudding and a bad dream afterwards!"
said the Government when Pet had told the whole story about the gowns,
and the money, and the bread-basket, and the poor; and then the
Government took a pinch of snuff and sent Queen Pet back to her nursery.

The next day, when all the nurses had gone to their dinner again, Pet
was leaning out of her nursery window, with her two elbows on the sills
and her face between her hands, and she was gazing down on the charming
gardens below, and away off over the fields and hills of her beautiful
kingdom of Goldenlands. "Where do the poor live, I wonder?" she thought;
"and I wonder what they are like? Oh, that I could be a good queen like
my mother, and be of use to my people! How I wish that I had a ladder to
reach down into the garden, and then I could run away all over my
kingdom and find things out for myself."

Just as she thought thus an exquisite butterfly perched on her finger
and said gaily,--

"A thousand spiders
All weaving in a row,
Can weave you a ladder
To fit your little toe."

"Can they, indeed?" cried Pet; "and are you acquainted with the
spiders?"

"I should think so, indeed," said the butterfly; "I am engaged to be
married to a spider; I have been engaged ever since I was a
caterpillar."

"Well, just ask them to be so good!" said Pet, and away flew the
butterfly, coming back in a moment with a whole cloud of spiders
following her.

"Be as quick as you can, please, lest my nurses should come back from
dinner," said Pet, as the spiders worked away. "Fortunately they have
all good appetites, and cannot bear to leave table without their six
helpings of pudding."

The ladder being finished, Pet tripped down it into the garden, where
she was hidden at once in a wilderness of roses, out of which she made
her way through a wood, and across a stream quite far into the open
country of her kingdom.

She was running very fast, with her head down, when she heard a step
following her, and a voice speaking to her, and looking round, saw a
very extraordinary person indeed. He was very tall and all made of
loose, clanking bones; he carried a scythe in one hand, and an hourglass
in the other, and he had a pleasant voice, which made Pet not so much
afraid of him as she otherwise might have been.

"It is no use trying to run away from me," s