So matters went from pence to ha’pennies, as the saying goes, till finally the Princess could bear it no longer, so she found her cloak and stole down to the triple gates.
Everything went very much as it had before, save that there was no Prince asleep under the tree where she had first found him. Then the Princess would have turned back, but the little brook which followed at her heel had swollen out into a broad, deep river, and there was nothing to do but go ahead, till she came to a cottage among the trees, and before the door sat an old, old woman, spinning gold thread out of moonlight. And by that any one could have told that she was a fairy, but the Princess thought it was always done that way in the world.
“Oh, Mother,” she cried, “how shall I find my way out of the forest?”
But the old woman went on spinning, and the Princess thought that she had never seen anything fly so fast as the shuttle.
“Where were you wanting to go?” she asked.
“I am searching for the Prince from the west,” said the Princess sadly. “Can you tell me where to find him?”
The fairy shook her head and went on with her spinning, so fast that you could not see the shuttle at all.
But the Princess begged so prettily that finally she said,
“If I were looking for a Prince, I would follow my nose until I came to the Black Forest, and then I would ask the Wizard with Three Dragons, who knows all about it, and more, too! That is, unless I thought that I would be afraid in the Black Forest.”
“What is afraid?” asked the Little Princess. “I do not know that.”