honey-bag break not; I should be sorry to have you
overflown with a honey-bag. Where is Mustard-seed?"
"Here, sir," said Mustard-seed: "what is your will?"
"Nothing," said the clown, "good Mr. Mustard-seed, but to help Mr.
Pease-blossom to scratch; I must go to a barber's, Mr. Mustard-seed, for
methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face."
"My sweet love," said the queen, "what will you have to eat? I have a
venturous fairy shall seek the squirrel's hoard, and fetch you some new
nuts."
"I had rather have a handful of dried pease," said the clown, who with
his ass's head had got an ass's appetite. "But, I pray, let none of your
people disturb me, for I have a mind to sleep."
"Sleep, then," said the queen, "and I will wind you in my arms. O how I
love you! how I dote upon you!"
When the fairy king saw the clown sleeping in the arms of his queen, he
advanced within her sight, and reproached her with having lavished her
favours upon an ass.
This she could not deny, as the clown was then sleeping within her arms,
with his ass's head crowned by her with flowers.
When Oberon had teased her for some time, he again demanded the
changeling boy; which she, ashamed of being discovered by her lord with
her new favourite, did not dare to refuse him.
Oberon, having thus obtained the little boy he had so long wished for to
be his page, took pity on the disgraceful situation into which, by his
merry contrivance, he had brought his Titania, and threw some of the
juice of the other flower into her eyes; and the fairy queen immediately
recovered her senses, and wondered at her late dotage, saying how she
now loathed the sight of the strange monster.
Oberon likewise took the ass's head from off the clown, and left him to
finish his nap with his own fool's head upon his shoulders.
Oberon and his Titania being now perfectly reconciled, he related to her
the history of the lovers, and their midnight quarrels; and she agreed
to go with him and see the end of their adventures.
The fairy king and queen found the lovers and their fair ladies, at no
great distance from each other, sleeping on a grass-plot; for Puck, to
make amends for his former mistake, had contrived with the utmost
diligence to bring them all to the same spot, unknown to each other; and
he had carefully removed the charm from off the eyes of Lysander with
the antidote the fairy king gave to him.
Hermia first awoke, and finding her lost Lysander asle
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