animals, frees the castle of enchantment, and marries the prince.
Note, too, that the old-world story-tellers were sensitive to the dramatic effect of the contrasts in life. The miller's daughter, innocent victim of her father's ambition, sits down in despair to weep over an impossible task, and "at this moment the door opens and in comes a comical little dwarf" who with three magical whirrs of the spinning-wheel turn a roomful of straw into gold. It is the very day of her fifteenth birthday that the princess must take to explore the castle and come upon unsuspected spinning-wheel with which to prick her finger that the witch's prophecy may be fulfilled, but, as is the merry good luck of romance, it is on the last day of the hundred years that the prince goes hunting to spy, not deer, but the towers of the identical castle in which the Sleeping Beauty lies, inquires about it of everyone until he meets the very man who can tell him what "my father told me," and rides off to awaken the princess. It is always so in literature sound at heart, whether it be in a Shakespearean comedy, in which cottages appear in the forest in the nick of time as night is falling and lovely ladies and gallant knights are footsore and weary; or whether it be in simple fairy tale abounding in porridge pots, appearing when folks are on the
