Hear, impatient spectator, the simple plot and its brief process. You are, after a fashion, informed with what studious, persevering, and unmerciful violation of all gentle decorum and feminine pity, the lovely marble-souled tyranness has, in the course of the last three or four years, turned back from her beetle-browed castle-gate, one by one, as they showed themselves there--a hundred, all worthily born--otherwise more and less meritorious--petitioners for that whip-and-javelin-bearing hand. You are NOW to know, that upon this very morning, an embassy from the willow-wearers all--or, to speak indeed more germanely to the matter, of the BASKET-BEARERS[22], waited upon their beautiful enemy with an ultimatum and manifesto in one, importing first a requisition to surrender; then, in case of refusal to capitulate, the announcement that HYMEN having found in CUPID an inefficient ally, he was about associating with himself, in league offensive, the god MARS, with intent of carrying the Maiden-fortress by storm, and reducing the aforesaid wild occupants of the stronghold into captivity--whereunto she made answer-- ----our castle's strength Will laugh a siege to scorn-- herself laughing outrageously to scorn the senders and the sent This crowning of wrong upon wrong will the Fairies, in the first place, wreak and right. [Footnote 22: To German ears--to SEND A BASKET--is to REFUSE A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE.] But further, later upon the same unlucky day, the Kingdom of Elves, being in full council assembled in the broad light of the sun, upon the fair greensward; ere the very numerous, but not widely sitting diet had yet well opened its proceedings--"tramp, tramp, across the land," came, flying at full speed, boar-spear in hand, our madcap huntress; and without other note of preparation sounded than their own thunder, her iron-grey's hoofs were in the thick of the sage assembly, causing an indecorous trepidation, combined with devastation dire to persons and--wearing apparel. This wrong, in the second place, the Fairies will wreak and right. And all transgression and injury, under one procedure, which is--_summary_; as, from the character of the judges and executioners, into whose hands the sinner has fallen, you would expect; sufficiently prankish too. With one sleight of their magical hand they turn the impoverished heiress of ill-possessed acres forth upon the highway, doomed to earn, with strenuous manual industry, her livelihood; until, from the winnings of her handicraft, she is moreover able to make good, as far as this was liable to pecuniary assessment, the damage sustained under foot of her fiery barb by the Fairy realm; comfort with handsome presents the rejected suitors; and until, thoroughly tame, she yields into her softened and opened bosom, now rid of its intemperate inmates, an entrance to the once debarred and contemned visitant--LOVE.