y waiting till he should awake, and
nodding, and winking, and whispering to each other about the body in the
grass. Presently his royal highness woke up, yawned, complained that the
gout grew worse as he got older, and asked for the prince, who had been
sitting by him just now. Then looking round and seeing that all were a
little constrained in their manner, he glanced in the same direction
they did, and exclaimed that there was his poor son and heir lying in
the grass!

"With great lamentation he had the body laid out in state, and called in
the court physicians to examine how the prince (for so he persisted in
calling the dead monarch) came by his fate. Now, there was no
disguising the fact that the deceased had been most foully murdered,
for his skull was driven in by the force of the blow; but you see those
were dangerous times, and with a despotic king eyeing them all the
while, what could the physicians do? They discovered that there was a
small projecting branch which had been broken off half-way down the tree
and which had a sharp edge, or splinter, and that this splinter
precisely fitted the wound in the head. Without doubt the prince had
been seized with sudden illness, had fallen and struck his head against
the splinter. It was ordered that this bough should be at once removed.
Kapchack raised a great lamentation, as he had lost his son and heir,
and in that character the dead monarch was ceremoniously interred in the
royal vaults, which are in the drain the hunted hare took refuge in
under the orchard.

"And so complete was the resemblance the prince bore to his dead parent,
owing to the loss of his eye and the plucking of his feathers, that for
the most part the courtiers actually believed that it really was the
prince they had buried, and all the common people accepted it without
doubt. One or two who hinted at a suspicion when they were alone with
Kapchack the Second received promises of vast rewards to hold their
tongues; and no sooner had they left his presence than he had them
assassinated. Thus the dynasty was firmly consolidated, just as the dead
founder had desired, though in rather a different manner to what he
expected.

"But the new (or as he appeared the old) king had not been many days on
the throne when he remembered the immense treasure of which his parent
had been possessed. Sending every one away on one pretext and another,
he searched the palace from attic to basement, peeped into all t