he awakes may be this despised lady.  You will know the man by the Athenian garments which he wears.”  Puck promised to manage this matter very dexterously:  and then Oberon went, unperceived by Titania, to her bower, where she was preparing to go to rest.  Her fairy bower was a bank, where grew wild thyme, cowslips, and sweet violets, under a canopy of woodbine, musk-roses, and eglantine.  There Titania always slept some part of the night; her coverlet the enameled skin of a snake, which, though a small mantle, was wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

He found Titania giving orders to her fairies, how they were to employ themselves while she slept.  “Some of you,” said her majesty, “must kill cankers in the musk-rose buds, and some wage war with the bats for their leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, come not near me:  but first sing me to sleep.  Then they began to sing this song: 

  “You spotted snakes with double tongue,
  Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
  Newts and blindworms do no wrong,
  Come not near our Fairy Queen. 
  Philomel, with melody,
  Sing in our sweet lullaby,
  Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby;
  Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,
  Come our lovely lady nigh;
  So good night with lullaby.”

When the fairies had sung their queen asleep with this pretty lullaby, they left her to perform the important services she had enjoined them.  Oberon then softly drew near his Titania, and dropped some of the love-juice on her eyelids, saying,

  “What thou seest when them dost wake,
  Do it for thy true-love take.”

But to return to Hermia, who made her escape out of her father’s house that night, to avoid the death she was doomed to for refusing to marry Demetrius.  When she entered the wood, she found her dear Lysander waiting for her, to conduct her to his aunt’s house; but before they had passed half through the wood, Hermia was so much fatigued, that Lysander, who was very careful of this dear lady, who had proved her affection for him even by hazarding her life for his sake, persuaded her to rest till morning on a bank of soft moss, and lying down himself on the ground at some little distance, they soon fell fast asleep.  Here they were found by Puck, who, seeing a handsome young man asleep, and perceiving that his clothes were made in the Athenian fashion, and that a pretty lady was sleeping near him, concluded that this must be the Athenian maid and her disdainful lover whom Oberon had sent him to seek; and he naturally enough conjectured that, as they were alone together, she must be the first thing he would see when he awoke; so, without more ado, he proceeded to pour some of the juice of the little purple flower into his eyes.  But it so fell out, that Helena came that way, and, instead of Hermia, was the first object Lysander beheld when he opened his eyes; and strange to relate, so powerful was the love-charm, all his love for Hermia vanished away, and Lysander fell in love with Helena.