with a great monkey, though he was only three years old.
He carried the child to his wife, who hid him where she had hidden his
sister, and then cooked a very tender little kid in the place of little
Day, which the ogress thought wonderfully good. All had gone well enough
so far, but one evening this wicked Queen said to the head cook, "I
should like to eat the Queen with the same sauce that I had with the
children."

Then the poor cook was indeed in despair, for he did not know how he
should be able to deceive her. The young Queen was over twenty years of
age, without counting the hundred years she had slept, and no longer
such tender food, although her skin was still white and beautiful, and
where among all his animals should he find one old enough to take her
place?

He resolved at last that, to save his own life, he would kill the Queen,
and he went up to her room, determined to carry out his purpose without
delay. He worked himself up into a passion, and entered the young
Queen's room, dagger in hand. He did not wish, however, to take her by
surprise, and so he repeated to her, very respectfully, the order he had
received from the Queen-mother. "Do your duty," she said, stretching out
her neck to him; "obey the orders that have been given you. I shall
again see my children, my poor children, whom I loved so dearly," for
she had thought them dead, ever since they had been carried away from
her without a word of explanation.

"No, no, madam!" replied the poor cook, touched to the quick, "you shall
not die, and you shall see your children again, but it will be in my own
house, where I have hidden them; I will again deceive the Queen-mother
by serving up to her a young hind in your stead."

He led her forthwith to his own apartments, then, leaving her to embrace
her children and weep with them, he went and prepared a hind, which the
Queen ate at her supper with as much appetite as if it had been the
young Queen. She exulted in her cruelty, and intended to tell the King,
on his return, that some ferocious wolves had devoured the Queen, his
wife, and her two children.

One evening, while she was prowling, as usual, round the courts and
poultry-yards of the castle, to inhale the smell of fresh meat, she
overheard little Day crying in one of the lower rooms, because the
Queen, his mother, was about to whip him for being naughty, and she also
heard little Aurora begging forgiveness for her brother. The ogress
recogni