room, dragging himself about with his arms rather
than his legs, and sometimes trying feebly to crawl from one chair to
another, it seemed to strike the father that all was not right with his
son.

"How old is his Royal Highness?" said he suddenly to the nurse.

"Two years, three months, and five days, please your Majesty."

"It does not please me," said the King, with a sigh. "He ought to be far
more forward than he is now ought he not, brother? You, who have so many
children, must know. Is there not something wrong about him?"

"Oh, no," said the Crown-Prince, exchanging meaning looks with the
nurse, who did not understand at all, but stood frightened and trembling
with the tears in her eyes. "Nothing to make your Majesty at all uneasy.
No doubt his Royal Highness will outgrow it in time."

"Outgrow--what?"

"A slight delicacy--ahem!--in the spine; something inherited, perhaps,
from his dear mother."

"Ah, she was always delicate; but she was the sweetest woman that ever
lived. Come here, my little son."

And as the Prince turned round upon his father a small, sweet, grave
face,--so like his mother's,--his Majesty the King smiled and held out
his arms. But when the boy came to him, not running like a boy, but
wriggling awkwardly along the floor, the royal countenance clouded over.

"I ought to have been told of this. It is terrible--terrible! And for a
prince too. Send for all the doctors in my kingdom immediately."

They came, and each gave a different opinion and ordered a different
mode of treatment. The only thing they agreed in was what had been
pretty well known before, that the Prince must have been hurt when he
was an infant--let fall, perhaps, so as to injure his spine and lower
limbs. Did nobody remember?

No, nobody. Indignantly, all the nurses denied that any such accident
had happened, was possible to have happened, until the faithful
country nurse recollected that it really had happened on the day of the
christening. For which unluckily good memory all the others scolded her
so severely that she had no peace of her life, and soon after, by the
influence of the young lady nurse who had carried the baby that fatal
day, and who was a sort of connection of the Crown-Prince--being his
wife's second cousin once removed--the poor woman was pensioned off and
sent to the Beautiful Mountains from whence she came, with orders to
remain there for the rest of her days.

But of all this the King knew not