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Rh uneasy respecting her promise to the Fairies, as the time approached for her confinement, fell into an alarming melancholy. She sighed eternally, and looked daily worse and worse. The King grew anxious; he pressed the Queen to reveal to him the cause of her sadness, and after a great deal of trouble she informed him of all that had passed between her and the Fairies, and how she had promised to give them the daughter she was about to bring into the world. 'What!' said the King, 'we have no children, you know how much I desire to have some, and for the sake of eating two or three apples you are capable of having given away your daughter? You can have no affection for me!' Thereupon he overwhelmed her with a thousand reproaches, which were almost the death of my poor mother; but that did not satisfy him, he had her locked up in a tower, and surrounded it with soldiers to prevent her having communication with anybody in the world except the officers of her household, and of these he changed such as had been with her at the Fairy Castle.

"The misunderstanding between the King and the Queen threw the whole Court into infinite consternation. Everybody changed their fine clothes for such as were more suitable to the general sorrow. The King, on his part, appeared inexorable. He never saw his wife, and as soon as I was born he had me brought into the palace to be nursed, while she remained a most unhappy prisoner. The Fairies knew all that took place; they became irritated, they would have me, they looked upon me as their property and my detention as a theft.

"Before they sought for a vengeance proportionate to their vexation, they sent a grand embassy to the King to warn him to set the Queen at liberty, to restore her to his favour, and to beg him also to deliver me up to their ambassadors in order that I might be nursed and brought up by the Fairies. The ambassadors were so little and so deformed (for they were hideous dwarfs) that they had not the power of persuading the King to comply with their request. He refused bluntly, and if they had not taken their departure instantly something worse might have happened to them. When the Fairies heard of my father's conduct, they were indignant to the greatest degree, and after having desolated his six kingdoms by the infliction of every ill they could think of, they let loose a terrific Dragon, that poisoned the air wherever he