saying, the lovely
little rivers whose fountains are the clouds, and which cut their own
channels through the air, and make sweet noises rubbing against their
banks as they hurry down and down, until at length they are pulled up
on a sudden, with a musical plash, in the very heart of an odorous
flower, that first gasps and then sighs up a blissful scent, or on the
bald head of a stone that never says, Thank you;--while the very sheep
felt it blessing them, though it could never reach their skins through
the depth of their long wool, and the veriest hedgehog--I mean the one
with the longest spikes--came and spiked himself out to impale as many
of the drops as he could;--while the rain was thus falling, and the
leaves, and the flowers, and the sheep, and the cattle, and the
hedgehog, were all busily receiving the golden rain, something
happened. It was not a great battle, nor an earthquake, nor a
coronation, but something more important than all those put together. A
BABY-GIRL WAS BORN; and her father was a king; and her mother was a
queen; and her uncles and aunts were princes and princesses; and her
first-cousins were dukes and duchesses; and not one of her
second-cousins was less than a marquis or marchioness, or of their
third-cousins less than an earl or countess: and below a countess they
did not care to count. So the little girl was Somebody; and yet for all
that, strange to say, the first thing she did was to cry. I told you it
was a strange country.

As she grew up, everybody about her did his best to convince her that
she was Somebody; and the girl herself was so easily persuaded of it
that she quite forgot that anybody had ever told her so, and took it
for a fundamental, innate, primary, first-born, self-evident,
necessary, and incontrovertible idea and principle that SHE WAS
SOMEBODY. And far be it from me to deny it. I will even go so far as to
assert that in this odd country there was a huge number of Somebodies.
Indeed, it was one of its oddities that every boy and girl in it, was
rather too ready to think he or she was Somebody; and the worst of it
was that the princess never thought of there being more than one
Somebody--and that was herself.

Far away to the north in the same country, on the side of a bleak hill,
where a horse-chestnut or a sycamore was never seen, where were no
meadows rich with buttercups, only steep, rough, breezy slopes, covered
with dry prickly furze and its flowers of red gold,