o speaks it will be
beheaded, if it is the High Lord Chancellor, himself!"

Then it was the turn of the Princess to weep, for she loved her parents
dearly, but she could not promise to forget the Prince.

So matters went from pence to ha'pennies, as the saying goes, till
finally the Princess could bear it no longer, so she found her cloak and
stole down to the triple gates.

Everything went very much as it had before, save that there was no
Prince asleep under the tree where she had first found him. Then the
Princess would have turned back, but the little brook which followed at
her heel had swollen out into a broad, deep river, and there was nothing
to do but go ahead, till she came to a cottage among the trees, and
before the door sat an old, old woman, spinning gold thread out of
moonlight. And by that any one could have told that she was a fairy, but
the Princess thought it was always done that way in the world.

"Oh, Mother," she cried, "how shall I find my way out of the forest?"

But the old woman went on spinning, and the Princess thought that she
had never seen anything fly so fast as the shuttle.

"Where were you wanting to go?" she asked.

"I am searching for the Prince from the west," said the Princess sadly.
"Can you tell me where to find him?"

The fairy shook her head and went on with her spinning, so fast that you
could not see the shuttle at all.

But the Princess begged so prettily that finally she said,

"If I were looking for a Prince, I would follow my nose until I came to
the Black Forest, and then I would ask the Wizard with Three Dragons,
who knows all about it, and more, too! That is, unless I thought that I
would be afraid in the Black Forest."

"What is afraid?" asked the Little Princess. "I do not know that."

And no more she did, so the fairy laughed, for she saw trouble coming
for the Wizard. She stopped her wheel with a click, but for all her fast
spinning, there was only enough gold thread to go around the second
finger of the Princess's left hand.

As for the Princess, she thanked the old lady very kindly, and set
bravely off toward the Black Forest.

But the Wizard with Three Dragons only laughed as he gazed into his
crystal globe, for in it he could see everything that was happening in
any place in the world, and I do not need Jacob Wise-man to tell me that
a globe like that is worth having!

Now, when the Prince had left the Princess in fairyland, he lost no time
in