After many, many years there came a king's son into that land: and an old man told him the story of the thicket of thorns; and how a beautiful palace stood behind it, and how a wonderful princess, called Briar Rose, lay in it asleep, with all her court.
Then he went on still farther, and all was so still that he could hear every breath he drew; till at last he came to the old tower, and opened the door of the little room in which Briar Rose was; and there she lay, fast asleep on a couch by the window.
And then the prince and Briar Rose were married, and the wedding feast was given; and they lived happily together all their lives long.
It was damp and smelly, and over- grown with thorns and
briars.
Over the moat Will sprang, through the bushes and briars, across the swamp, over stocks and stones, up the woodland roads in long leaps like a scared jack rabbit.
Yonder came hobbling a man with a lame ankle, or another with his shins torn by the briars or another with his jacket all muddy from the marsh.
A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
"Let the wise chief have no cares for his journey," continued Hard- Heart with an earnest solicitude, that led him to forget, for the moment, that others were waiting to address his adopted parent; "a hundred Loups shall clear his path from briars."
Go, my children; remember the just chief of the Pale-faces, and clear your own tracks from briars."
On the following day the search was resumed, and the poor fellow was at length discovered lying beneath a group of rocks, his legs swollen, his feet torn and bloody from walking through bushes and
briars, and himself half- dead with cold, hunger, and fatigue.
After penetrating through the brush, matted as it was with
briars, for a few hundred feet, he entered an open space, that surrounded a low, green hillock, which was crowned by the decayed blockhouse in question.
Don Quixote said that even if it reached to the bottomless pit he meant to see where it went to; so they bought about a hundred fathoms of rope, and next day at two in the afternoon they arrived at the cave, the mouth of which is spacious and wide, but full of thorn and wild-fig bushes and brambles and
briars, so thick and matted that they completely close it up and cover it over.
The post, though fast asleep, roused up at the first steps of the three visitors amongst the
briars and grass that invaded the porch.
Once upon a time, through a strange country, there rode some goodly knights, and their path lay by a deep wood, where tangled
briars grew very thick and strong, and tore the flesh of them that lost their way therein.
Then she fled homeward as quickly as she could, torn and bleeding from the wounds of thorns and
briars, but more lacerated in mind, and threw herself upon her bed, distracted.
