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Princess prized it just as much as though it had been made of gold.

The only person who was not happy on the Princess’s birthday was the Queen, and she went about with a pale face and a look of great anxiety.

“Come, come, my love,” said the King, “what is the matter with you? Surely you are not thinking of that foolish old prophecy!”

“How can I help thinking about it?” the Queen answered. “I have not been able to get it out of my mind for fifteen-years, and now that the day has come I am afraid.”

“Make your mind easy,” said the King. “Nothing is going to happen. Why, there’s not a spinning-wheel within a hundred miles. I have taken good care of that!’ And he went away chuckling, to attend a meeting of his Cabinet. But the Queen shook her head.

Now while the King and Queen were talking, the Princess Briar-Rose was wandering about in the castle, visiting room after room, as she had done many times before. The castle was so big that a stranger might easily have been lost in its maze of stairways and corridors, but Briar-Rose knew every part of it quite well, from the great kitchens below ground, where on feast days a score of cooks prepared the dinner for hundreds of guests, to the topmost turret above the battlements, where the sentries kept watch with their pikes on their shoulders. There was only one part of the castle which Briar-Rose had never explored, and that was an ancient tower which rose from the eastern end. The door of that tower was always locked, and