[Illustration]

What a day that was! Everybody came to wish her many happy returns, and
she had so many presents that at least a dozen servants were kept busy
unwrapping the parcels. The King gave her a white pony with a saddle of
red velvet, and bridle and stirrups of gold, while the Queen's present
was a beautiful and costly necklace of pearls. Even the boy who turned
the spit in the kitchen brought her something, and though it was only a
little wooden shoe which he had carved with his own hands, the Princess
prized it just as much as though it had been made of gold.

The only person who was not happy on the Princess's birthday was the
Queen, and she went about with a pale face and a look of great anxiety.

"Come, come, my love," said the King, "what is the matter with you?
Surely you are not thinking of that foolish old prophecy!"

"How can I help thinking about it?" the Queen answered. "I have not been
able to get it out of my mind for fifteen years, and now that the day
has come I am afraid."

"Make your mind easy," said the King. "Nothing is going to happen. Why,
there's not a spinning-wheel within a hundred miles. I have taken good
care of that!" And he went away chuckling, to attend a meeting of his
Cabinet. But the Queen shook her head.

[Illustration]

Now while the King and Queen were talking, the Princess Briar-Rose was
wandering about in the castle, visiting room after room, as she had done
many times before. The castle was so big that a stranger might easily
have been lost in its maze of stairways and corridors, but Briar-Rose
knew every part of it quite well, from the great kitchens below ground,
where on feast days a score of cooks prepared the dinner for hundreds of
guests, to the topmost turret above the battlements, where the sentries
kept watch with their pikes on their shoulders. There was only one part
of the castle which Briar-Rose had never explored, and that was an
ancient tower which rose from the eastern end. The door of that tower
was always locked, and although the Princess had often tried to find
the key she had never succeeded. The servants told her that the tower
had not been inhabited for nearly a hundred years, and it had never been
entered within the memory of anybody in the castle.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

To-day Briar-Rose flitted restlessly from place to place. She peeped
into the kitchen and saw the kitchen boys turning the spits on which
whole oxen were being r