een was very sad, and was about to ask what could be the matter; but,
with clever tact, she refrained from alluding to the subject. The queen
had been so confiding and so sisterly with her, that it would not do to
speak of it to any one else; and perhaps, too, the queen did not wish
others to know that she was sad.

For many days, there was a pilgrimage of court ladies and gentlemen to
Walpurga for the sake of seeing something that was quite new to them.
Doctor Gunther had given Walpurga permission to get a distaff and spin.
To see a spinning-wheel in use seemed like a fairy-tale. Few of the
ladies and gentlemen had ever seen such a thing before, and now they
came and looked on wonderingly. Walpurga, however, always laughed
merrily when she wound a fresh thread on the spindle. All the court
came to look at the distaff, and Schoning declared that this was the
implement with which Little Thomrose had injured herself.

Irma was again the object of envy, for she, too, knew how to spin and,
like a village neighbor, would sometimes come and join threads for
Walpurga. They both sat spinning at the same distaff, and, while they
worked, their voices joined in merry songs.

"What's to be done with what we spin?" asked Irma.

Walpurga was vexed, for the question had destroyed the charm. She said:
"Little shirts for my prince; but they must only be of my spinning."
After that, she laid the bobbins which Irma had filled in a separate
place. The threads which she had moistened with her own lips, should be
the only ones used by the prince.

Irma could not help telling Baron Schoning of Walpurga's plan, and it
suggested to him a poem, in which he alluded to the legend of a fairy,
or enchanted princess, who was spinning flax for her darling. The queen
was delighted with the poem, and, for the first time, and with perfect
sincerity, praised the Baron's verses.

Walpurga was sitting at her distaff and telling the prince in the
cradle the story of the King of the Carps, who swims about at the
bottom of the lake. He's more than seven thousand years old, wears a
crown on his head, has a great long beard and, up over him, millions of
fishes are swimming about and playing tag with each other and when
one's naughty and envious and quarrelsome and disobedient, the naughty
pike comes and eats him, and then comes the fisherman who catches the
pike, and then comes the cook who cuts up the pike, and then all the
little fishes jump out and go b