Page:History of the sleeping beauty in the wood.pdf/9

9 could have made a passage through them. Indeed, nothing but the turrets of the palace were to be seen above the thick wood formed by the trees, and even only at a great distance. The fairy in this, no doubt, employed the wholowhole [sic] skill of her art, to preserve the princess, during her long sleep, from the observation of the curious.

At the end of the hundred years, the son of a reigning king, who was of a different family from that of the princess, happened to pass near the palace as was hunting, and asked his attendants to whom the and the wood belonged. They each answered agreeably to what he had heard of the place. Some of them said, it was an old castle that was haunted by ghosts; others, that all the witches in the country essembled in it to hold their nightly meetings; but the most common opinion was that it was inhabited by an ogre, who retired within its walls to devour all the children he ran away with, where he could eat them without fear of pursuit, since no one but himself could get through the wood; when an old peasant approached and and said,—“May it please your royal highness, I

was told more than fifty years ago, by my father, who it from my grandfather, that there was concealed this palace a princess of most oxquisiteexquisite [sic] beauty, who was condemned by a fairy to sleep a hundred years, and was then to be awakened by the son of a king, who was be her husband.”