ghtened and the rain streamed down
in torrents. It was fearful! There was a knocking heard at the Palace
gate, and the old King went to open it.

There stood a Princess outside the gate; but oh, in what a sad plight
she was from the rain and the storm! The water was running down from
her hair and her dress into the points of her shoes and out at the heels
again. And yet she said she was a true Princess!

'Well, we shall soon find that!' thought the old Queen. But she said
nothing, and went into the sleeping-room, took off all the bed-clothes,
and laid a pea on the bottom of the bed. Then she put twenty mattresses
on top of the pea, and twenty eider-down quilts on the top of the
mattresses. And this was the bed in which the Princess was to sleep.

The next morning she was asked how she had slept.

'Oh, very badly!' said the Princess. 'I scarcely closed my eyes all
night! I am sure I don't know what was in the bed. I laid on something
so hard that my whole body is black and blue. It is dreadful!'

Now they perceived that she was a true Princess, because she had felt
the pea through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down quilts.

No one but a true Princess could be so sensitive.

So the Prince married her, for now he knew that at last he had got hold
of a true Princess. And the pea was put into the Royal Museum, where it
is still to be seen if no one has stolen it. Now this is a true story.

THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

There were once a Scotsman and an Englishman and an Irishman serving in
the army together, who took it into their heads to run away on the first
opportunity they could get. The chance came and they took it. They
went on travelling for two days through a great forest, without food or
drink, and without coming across a single house, and every night they
had to climb up into the trees through fear of the wild beasts that were
in the wood. On the second morning the Scotsman saw from the top of his
tree a great castle far away. He said to himself that he would certainly
die if he stayed in the forest without anything to eat but the roots of
grass, which would not keep him alive very long. As soon, then, as he
got down out of the tree he set off towards the castle, without so much
as telling his companions that he had seen it at all; perhaps the hunger
and want they had suffered had changed their nature so much that the
one did not care what became of the other if he could save himself. He
travelle