Brick Fairy Tales: Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, and More (15 page)

“Ah! thou wicked child,” cried the enchantress “What do I hear thee say! I thought I had separated thee from all the world, and yet thou hast deceived me.”

In her anger she clutched Rapunzel’s beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground.

And she was so pitiless that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery.

On the same day, however, that she cast out Rapunzel, the enchantress in the evening fastened the braids of hair which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the King’s son came and cried,

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair,”

she let the hair down.

The King’s son ascended,

but he did not find his dearest Rapunzel above, but the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks.

“Aha!” she cried mockingly, “Thou wouldst fetch thy dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has got it, and will scratch out thy eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to thee; thou wilt never see her more.”

The King’s son was beside himself with pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower.

He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell, pierced his eyes.

Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did nothing but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife.

Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness.

He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it,