and Mopsa; and Jack noticed, when he looked at her
towards evening, that she was now nearly as tall as himself, and that
her lovely brown hair floated down to her ankles.

"Jack," she said, before it grew dusk, "will you give me your little
purse that has the silver fourpence in it?"

Now Mopsa had often played with this purse. It was lined with a nice
piece of pale green silk, and when Jack gave it to her she pulled the
silk out, and shook it, and patted it, and stretched it, just as the
Queen had done, and it came into a most lovely cloak, which she tied
round her neck. Then she twisted up her long hair into a coil, and
fastened it round her head, and called to the fire-flies which were
beginning to glitter on the trees to come, and they came and alighted
in a row upon the coil, and turned into diamonds directly. So now
Mopsa had got a crown and a robe, and she was so beautiful that Jack
thought he should never be tired of looking at her; but it was nearly
dark now, and he was so sleepy and tired that he could not keep his
eyes open, though he tried very hard, and he began to blink, and then
he began to nod, and at last he fell fast asleep, and did not awake
till the morning.

Then he sat up in the boat, and looked about him. A wonderful country,
indeed!--no trees, no grass, no houses, nothing but red stones and red
sand,--and Mopsa was gone. Jack jumped on shore, for the boat had
stopped, and was close to the brink of the river. He looked about for
some time, and at last, in the shadow of a pale brown rock, he found
her; and oh! delightful surprise, the apple-woman was there too. She
was saying, "O my bones! Dearie, dearie me, how they do ache!" That
was not surprising, for she had been out all night. She had walked
beside the river with the Queen and her tribe till they came to a
little tinkling stream, which divides their country from the sandy
land, and there they were obliged to stop; they could not cross it.
But the apple-woman sprang over, and, though the Queen told her she
must come back again in twenty-four hours, she did not appear to be
displeased. Now the Guinea-hens, when they had come to listen, the day
before, to the apple-woman's song, had brought each of them a grain of
maize in her beak, and had thrown it into her apron; so when she got
up she carried it with her gathered up there, and now she had been
baking some delicious little cakes on a fire of dry sticks that the
river had drifted down, and