him to her little house where her daughter was sitting by the
fire. She received the King as if she were expecting him, and he
saw that she was certainly very beautiful; but she did not please
him, and he could not look at her without a secret feeling of
horror. As soon as he had lifted the maiden on to his horse the
old woman showed him the way, and the King reached his palace,
where the wedding was celebrated.

The King had already been married once, and had by his first wife
seven children, six boys and one girl, whom he loved more than
anything in the world. And now, because he was afraid that their
stepmother might not treat them well and might do them harm, he
put them in a lonely castle that stood in the middle of a wood.
It lay so hidden, and the way to it was so hard to find, that he
himself could not have found it out had not a wise-woman given
him a reel of thread which possessed a marvellous property: when
he threw it before him it unwound itself and showed him the way.
But the King went so often to his dear children that the Queen
was offended at his absence. She grew curious, and wanted to
know what he had to do quite alone in the wood. She gave his
servants a great deal of money, and they betrayed the secret to
her, and also told her of the reel which alone could point out
the way. She had no rest now till she had found out where the
King guarded the reel, and then she made some little white
shirts, and, as she had learnt from her witch-mother, sewed an
enchantment in each of them.

And when the King had ridden off she took the little shirts and
went into the wood, and the reel showed her the way. The
children, who saw someone coming in the distance, thought it was