Page:Researches respecting the Book of Sindibad and Portuguese Folk-Tales.djvu/86

 64 saying this a man passed by the palace selling and crying out cherries—he called the man and bought of him the basketful of cherries; he then took them to the school and gave the girls the cherries to eat. They all began eating the fruit, much pleased, and it was only the maid with the rose on her forehead that did not attempt to partake of them. The prince perceiving it asked her, "Well then will you not taste some?" She made a sign that she would not have any. The prince, surprised at not ever having heard her speak, inquired of the mistress, "Is that little girl dumb?" The mistress replied, "She is very shy, and if any one endeavours to make her speak or take any notice of her she immediately begins to cry." The girl's all began to play with the cherries and throw them about in their fun, but where should one of them fall but on the little girls head who had a rose on her forehead! Next day, when her mother combed her hair to go to school, finding a cherry entangled in it said to her, "Ah! tyrant, I see you have made yourself known," She stuck the comb into her head violently and killed her. She then had the corpse put into an iron chest together with all her jewels, and locked the chest in a chamber of the palace; but after a while from remorse and grief at what she had done to her poor daughter she pined away and died. Before she died she gave the prince the key of the room, telling him never to touch anything in it. The brother, in order to comply with the princess's injunction, took special care to keep those keys separate. The princess died after she had said this.

The prince, feeling lonely, now decided to marry, and gave his wife all the keys, at the same time telling her that she could open every door she liked except the one leading to the room which his sister the princess had asked him before she died never to examine. As the prince went one day to hunt, his mother-in-law, who lived with them in the palace, had a great wish to open this room, but her daughter told her not to do so because the