Page:The sleeping beauty (IA sleepingbeauty00evanrich).pdf/98

 hawk upon his wrist, slept leaning against a sleeping horse which he had been about to mount. Near by lay a page with a hound in leash, both sleeping as soundly as though they never would awake, and through a window in the stables the Prince saw a groom lying with a straw in his mouth.

In the stables themselves a like condition of things prevailed. The horses slept at their stalls with their noses to the mangers, standing on their four legs just as they were when they were enchanted a hundred years before, and on the back of one of them sat the stable-cat. Here and there upon the ground lay grooms and ostlers, fast asleep among the straw.

From the stables the Prince made his way to the great kitchen where he saw equally strange sights, and he could not help smiling when he came upon the cook with her hand still outstretched to clout the head of the unhappy scullion whom she had by the ear. Before the fires hung the spitted partridges and fowls that were cooking for the Princess’s birthday feast, and at the table a maid had fallen asleep with her hands in a large trough full of dough. She had been making the pastry for a pie when the sleep fell upon her, and a her side was another maid who had been plucking a black hen. At the sink a kitchen-knave was leaning over the pot he had been scouring.

Then the Prince went out into the great hall and saw the courtiers asleep in the window alcoves, or stretched out upon the polished floor. Everywhere was a silence so profound that the Prince was almost alarmed to hear his own breathing, and the beating of his heart sounded like a