Page:The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories.djvu/232

206 but I should like merely to know what you will leave me to live upon in the meantime." And Fioravante answered, "What the horses leave of their corn will be enough for you."

Only conceive how poor Cannetella now felt, and guess whether she did not curse the hour and the moment when she was born! cold and frozen, she made up with her tears what she wanted in food, cursing her fate and abusing the stars, which had brought her down from a royal palace to a stable, from mattresses of Barbary wool to straw, and from nice delicate morsels to the leavings of horses. And she led this miserable life for several months, during which time corn was given to the horses by an unseen hand, and what they left supported her.

But at the end of this time, as she was standing one day looking through a hole, she saw a most beautiful garden, in which there were so many espaliers of lemons, and grottos of citrons, and beds of flowers, and fruit-trees and trellises of vines, that it was a joy to behold. At this sight a great longing seized her for a fine bunch of grapes that caught her eye, and she said to herself, "Come what will, and if the sky fall, I will go out silently and softly and pluck it: what will it matter a hundred years hence? who is there to tell my husband? and should he by chance hear of it, what will he do to