A terrible fate was in store for the King’s proud and cruel mother. On the day of her son’s marriage she was returning in her chariot from the ceremony, much mortified and incensed by what had just taken place. Noticing, as she drove along, that her coachman had not brought out the team of horses she had ordered, and being already furious, she leaned forward to strike him with the golden sceptre in her hand, and, in so doing, overbalanced herself, and fell under the chariot-wheels, where she was almost crushed to death. She was conveyed to the palace with all speed, but, before she reached her apartments, she expired, muttering vengeance against everyone. The fate of the dwarf Grimaçon was very different. He was made Prime Minister and was the most honoured person in the King’s dominions. The King and Queen never took any step without first consulting him, and he lived to an advanced age beloved by all, but especially by their Majesties, who went to visit him every day in a magnificent palace which they built for him close by their own. THE DOVECOTE In a wide stretch of pasture, in the middle of a lonely field, with its back to the bleak north blast which swept over the shuddering grasses, making them hum and sing like complaining voices, stood a Dovecote. The solid masonry of its walls, in the crevices of which tufts of stone-crop and shepherd’s purse had sown themselves, and the irregular outlines of the crow-steps which ran up either side of its slanting roof had been familiar to the sight of so many generations that, as it had remained unused within the memory of the oldest, no one thought more of it than if it had been a stone-heap in the road, nor noticed the curious fact of its never falling into disrepair. At each end of the roof, above the crow-steps, two large stone balls stood out against the sky, and on these the rooks, going home in the red sunsets to a neighbouring rookery, perched from year’s end to year’s end, and no one but themselves, or a few inquisitive sheep, who might rub their woolly heads against the walls, seemed to remember the existence of the solitary building. At some little distance behind it the land rose in a steep slope, rolling upwards to where a fringe of fir-trees looked down upon the Dovecote, the fields, and the scattered habitations below. [Illustration: THE DOVECOTE]