a purr to be heard--deep, deathlike silence,
so that the death-watch ticking in the wainscot sounded quite loud.
What were the feelings of this principal nurse when she saw, close
beside her, a great, hideous mouse, standing on its hind legs, with its
horrid head laid on the princess's face! She sprang up with a scream of
terror. Everybody awoke; but then Dame Mouseyrinks (for she was the
great big mouse in Pirlipat's cradle) ran quickly away into the corner
of the room. The privy councillors of legation dashed after her, but
too late! She was off and away through a chink in the floor. The noise
awoke Pirlipat, who cried terribly. "Heaven be thanked, she is still
alive!" cried all the nurses; but what was their horror when they
looked at Pirlipat, and saw what the beautiful, delicate little thing
had turned into. An enormous bloated head (instead of the pretty little
golden-haired one), at the top of a diminutive, crumpled-up body, and
green, wooden-looking eyes staring, where the lovely azure-blue pair
had been, whilst her mouth had stretched across from the one ear to the
other.

"'Of course the queen nearly died of weeping and loud lamentation, and
the walls of the king's study had all to be hung with padded arras,
because he kept on banging his head against them, crying:

"'"Oh! wretched king that I am! Oh, wretched king that I am!"

"'Of course he might have seen, then, that it would have been much
better to eat his puddings with no fat in them at all, and let Dame
Mouseyrinks and her folk stay on under the hearthstone. But Pirlipat's
royal father thought not of that. What he did was to lay all the blame
on the court Clockmaker and Arcanist, Christian Elias Drosselmeier, of
Nuernberg. Wherefore he promulgated a sapient edict to the effect
that said Drosselmeier should, within the space of four weeks,
restore Princess Pirlipat to her pristine condition,--or, at least,
indicate an unmistakable and reliable process whereby that might be
accomplished,--or else suffer a shameful death by the axe of the common
headsman.

"'Drosselmeier was not a little alarmed; but he soon began to place
confidence in his art, and in his luck; so he proceeded to execute the
first operation which seemed to him to be expedient. He took Princess
Pirlipat very carefully to pieces, screwed off her hands and her feet,
and examined her interior structure. Unfortunately, he found that the
bigger she got the more deformed she would be, so tha