ntress
climbed up to her. "If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I will
for once try my fortune," said he; and the next day when it began to
grow dark, he went to the tower and cried--

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down thy hair."

Immediately the hair fell down and the King's son climbed up.

At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man such as her eyes
had never yet beheld came to her; but the King's son began to talk
to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so
stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to
see her. Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she
would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and
handsome, she thought, "He will love me more than old Dame Gothel
does;" and she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said, "I will
willingly go away with thee, but I do not know how to get down. Bring
with thee a skein of silk every time that thou comest, and I will
weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and
thou wilt take me on thy horse." They agreed that, until that time, he
should always come to see her in the evening, for the old woman came
by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel
said to her, "Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so
much heavier for me to draw up than the young King's son--he is with
me in a moment." "Ah! thou wicked child," cried the enchantress, "what
do I hear thee say? I thought I had separated thee from all the world,
and yet thou hast deceived me!" In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's
beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a
pair of scissors with the right, and, snip, snap, they were cut off,
and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that
she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great
grief and misery.

On the same day, however, that she cast out Rapunzel, the enchantress
in the evening fastened the braids of hair which she had cut off to
the hook of the window, and when the King's son came and cried cried--

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down thy hair,"

she let the hair down. The King's son ascended, but he did not find
his dearest Rapunzel above-only the enchantress, who gazed at him with
wicked and venomous looks. "Aha!" she cried mockingly, "thou wouldst
fetch thy dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in
the nest; the cat has got i