e great pain, and made him more unamiable than ever. The bumps,
nevertheless, grew larger, and as they increased, so the prince sickened
and pined away. At last a skilful surgeon proposed, as the only chance
of saving the prince's life, that the bumps should be cut out; and the
next morning was fixed for that operation. But at night the queen saw,
or dreamed she saw, a beautiful shape standing by her bedside. And it
said to her reproachfully, 'Ungrateful woman! How wouldst thou repay me
for the precious boon that my favour bestowed on thee! In me behold the
Queen of the Fairies. For the heir to thy kingdom, I consigned to thy
charge an infant from Fairyland, to become a blessing to thee and to
thy people; and thou wouldst inflict upon it a death of torture by the
surgeon's knife.' And the queen answered, 'Precious indeed thou mayest
call the boon,--a miserable, sickly, feverish changeling.'

"'Art thou so dull,' said the beautiful visitant, 'as not to comprehend
that the earliest instincts of the fairy child would be those of
discontent, at the exile from its native home? and in that discontent it
would have pined itself to death, or grown up, soured and malignant,
a fairy still in its power but a fairy of wrath and evil, had not the
strength of its inborn nature sufficed to develop the growth of its
wings. That which thy blindness condemns as the deformity of the
human-born, is to the fairy-born the crowning perfection of its beauty.
Woe to thee, if thou suffer not the wings of the fairy child to grow.'

"And the next morning the queen sent away the surgeon when he came with
his horrible knife, and removed the back-board and the steel machines
from the prince's shoulders, though all the doctors predicted that the
child would die. And from that moment the royal heir began to recover
bloom and health. And when at last, out of those deforming bumps,
budded delicately forth the plumage of snow-white wings, the wayward
peevishness of the prince gave place to sweet temper. Instead of
scratching his teachers, he became the quickest and most docile of
pupils, grew up to be the joy of his parents and the pride of their
people; and people said, 'In him we shall have hereafter such a king as
we have never yet known.'"

Here ended Lily's tale. I cannot convey to you a notion of the pretty,
playful manner in which it was told. Then she said, with a grave shake
of the head, "But you do not seem to know what happened afterwards. Do