The queen said to them most obligingly, “Sisters, I should desire nothing more, if it was absolutely in my power to make the choice.  I am however obliged to you for your good-will, but must submit to what the emperor shall order on this occasion.  Let your husbands employ their friends to make interest, and get some courtier to ask this favour of his majesty; and if he speaks to me about it, be assured that I shall not only express the pleasure he does me, but thank him for making choice of you.”

The two husbands applied themselves to some courtiers their patrons, and begged of them to use their interest to procure their wives the honour they aspired to.  Those patrons exerted themselves so much in their behalf, that the emperor promised them to consider of the matter, and was as good as his word; for in conversation with the queen, he told her, that he thought her sisters were the most proper persons to assist her in her labour; but would not name them before he had asked her consent.  The queen, sensible of the deference the emperor so obligingly paid her, said to him, “Sir, I was prepared to do as your majesty might please to command.  But since you have been so kind as to think of my sisters, I thank you for the regard you have shewn them for my sake; and therefore I shall not dissemble, that I had rather have them than strangers.”

The emperor named the queen’s two sisters to be her midwives; and from that time they went frequently to the palace, overjoyed at the opportunity they should have of executing the detestable wickedness they had meditated against the queen.

When the queen’s time was up she was safely delivered of a young prince, as bright as the day; but neither his innocence nor beauty could move the cruel hearts of the merciless sisters.  They wrapped him up carelessly in his cloths, and put him into a basket, which they abandoned to the stream of a small canal, that ran under the queen’s apartment, and declared that she was delivered of a little dead dog, which they produced.  This disagreeable intelligence was announced to the emperor, who became so angry at the circumstance, that he was likely to have occasioned the queen’s death, if his grand vizier had not represented to him, that he could not, without injustice, make her answerable for the caprices of nature.

In the mean time, the basket in which the little prince was exposed was carried by the stream beyond a wall, which bounded the prospect of the queen’s apartment, and from thence floated with the current down the gardens.  By chance the intendant of the emperor’s gardens, one of the principal and most considerable officers of the kingdom, was walking in the garden by the side of this canal, and perceiving a basket floating, called to a gardener, who was not far off, to bring it to shore, that he might see what it contained.  The gardener, with a rake which he had in his hand, drew the basket to the side of the canal, took it up, and gave it to him.