Brick Fairy Tales: Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, and More (14 page)

and the enchantress climbed up to her.

“If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I will for once try my fortune,” said he,

and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried,

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair.”

Immediately the hair fell down

and the King’s son climbed up.

At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man such as her eyes had never yet beheld, came to her;

but the King’s son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her.

Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought, “He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does;” and she said yes, and laid her hand in his.

She said, “I will willingly go away with thee,

but I do not know how to get down.

Bring with thee a skein of silk every time that thou comest, and I will weave a ladder with it,

and when that is ready I will descend, and thou wilt take me on thy horse.”

They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her, “Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King’s son—he is with me in a moment.”