At length he was awakened by the sound of a voice calling his name:
‘Ogier, Ogier!’ and at the sound the present was forgotten, and the past rushed back. ‘Ogier, Ogier!’ whispered the voice again, and, looking, he saw standing by his bed not the queen, but Morgane le Fay.
‘Rise quickly,’ she said, ‘and put on your wedding garments. Clothe yourself in the mantle Charlemagne wore, and the crown that was placed upon his brow. Set on your feet his shoes of gold, and let me see you once as France would have seen you.’
He did her bidding, and she gazed at him awhile, then slowly drawing nigh she lifted the crown from his hair, and in its stead she put on him the wreath of laurel which brought peace and forgetfulness.
‘Now come with me,’ she said, holding out her hand, and together they left the palace unseen, and entered a barge that was waiting in the river, and in the sunrise they sailed away to the castle of Avallon.
[Adapted from Dunlop’s History of Prose Fiction, and Morris’s Ogier the Dane.]
HOW THE ASS BECAME A MAN AGAIN
Once upon a time there lived a young man who would do nothing from morning till night but amuse himself. His parents were dead and had left him plenty of money, but this was fast vanishing, and his friends shook their heads sadly, for when the money was gone they did not see where more was to come from. It was not that Apuleius (for that was the name of the youth) was stupid. He might have been a good soldier, or a scholar, or a worker in gold, if so it had pleased him, but from a child he had refused to do anything useful, and roamed about the city all day long in search of adventures. The only kind of learning to which he paid any heed was magic, and when he was in the house he would spend hours poring over great books of spells.