A little page dressed in black led Jim to the throne-room.  The king and his court no longer blazed in gold and jewels.  Black covered everybody and everything, even the golden throne itself, and grief and dismay were on all faces.

Then said the king, in a hollow tone:  “What know you of this vine?  Speak!”

And Jim, tremblingly, told the whole story.

“Wicked boy!” groaned the king.  “You well deserve punishment for the ruin you have brought on the land.  But I have passed my royal word, and you shall try to destroy the vine.  If you succeed, bad as you are, you then will be the king and I the cobbler.  But if you fail, you shall be put where you shall have nothing but melons to eat for the rest of your days.  Guards, take him away!”

That night, before the king and queen and all the assembled court, when the moon was fairly risen, Nimble Jim touched with the toe of the magic shoe the end of a tendril that was running rapidly up a tower.

In an instant, every vestige of the vine vanished throughout all the palace grounds; and in the morning the people all over the country shouted for joy and cried with one voice:  “Let us all go up to the coronation, for to-day we have a new king who has delivered us from the horrible vine.”

And on they came, in hordes, till the capital was full and the country about the palace was one vast camp, while throughout the kingdom not a trace of the vine was to be seen.

Then the nobles and prelates prepared for the coronation.  It was magnificent.  They girt Jim with the sword of state, clothed him in the imperial robes, placed the scepter in his hand, and, as the golden crown descended upon his head, all the people shouted: 

“Hail, King Nimblejimble, our deliverer!  Long live the king!”

[Illustration:  MAKING AN ENTRANCE FOR THE KING THROUGH THE MELON IN FRONT OF THE PALACE GATE.]

And the silly boy was happy.

Meanwhile, the poor, faithful old king, who cheerfully had given up all for his people, was hammering and stitching and digging away on Jim’s cobbler-bench off in the village; and Jim’s mother, whom the naughty boy, in his strange elevation, had forgotten all about, tenderly cared for the humbled old monarch.

Before long, the elfin queen saw how patient the old king and Jim’s mother were, and how badly Nimble Jim was behaving now he was king, for he was given up to all sorts of wickedness and tyranny, was fast becoming hated by every one, and himself was beginning to see that he was not nearly so happy as he had been while he was a cobbler.

Jim was really good at heart, only his unreasonable discontent with his lot had got him into all this misery.  At last, he began to repent, and, one moonlight night when he was walking alone on the palace terrace, he said: 

“I wish I could see that little elfin queen, and I would ask her to let me go back home again.”