distaffs that ever were seen. The queen commanded him to be brought into the palace, and he came up the stairs into her presence, but she did not recognize him in his merchant’s guise; moreover, she was not thinking ever to behold her father again; but Tebaldo recognized his daughter at once. The queen, when she saw how fair was the work of the spindles and distaffs, asked of the merchant what price he put upon them. ‘The price is great,’ he answered, ‘but to you I will give one of them for nothing, provided you suffer me to gratify a caprice of mine. This is that I may be permitted to sleep one night in the same room as your children.’ The good Doralice, in her pure and simple nature, never suspected the accursed design of the feigned merchant, and, yielding to the persuasion of her attendants, granted his request. But before the merchant was led to the sleeping chamber, certain ladies of the court deemed it wise to offer him a cup of wine well drugged to make him sleep sound, and when night had come and the merchant seemed overcome with fatigue, one of the ladies conducted him into the chamber of the king’s children, where there was prepared for him a sumptuous couch. Before she left him the lady said, ‘Good man, are you not thirsty?’ ‘Indeed I am,’ he replied; whereupon she handed him the drugged wine in a silver cup; but the crafty Tebaldo, while feigning to drink the wine, spilled it over his garments, and then lay down to rest. Now there was in the children’s room a side door through which it was possible to pass into the queen’s apartment. At midnight, when all was still, Tebaldo stole through this, and, going up to the bed beside which the queen had left her clothes, he took away a small dagger, which he had marked the day before hanging from her girdle. Then he returned to the children’s room and killed them both with the dagger, which he immediately put back into its scabbard, all bloody as it was, and having opened a window he let himself down by a cord. As soon as the shopmen of the city were astir, he went to a barber’s and had his long beard taken off, for fear he might be recognized, and having put on different clothes he walked about the city without apprehension.