he had heard that sigh--he was sure it was
hers--when he had asked to see "just one little boy."

"I think I had rather not look at him again," said the poor little
Prince, drawing himself back into the center of his cloak, and resuming
his favorite posture, sitting like a Turk, with his arms wrapped round
his feeble, useless legs.

"You're no good to me," he said, patting them mournfully. "You never
will be any good to me. I wonder why I had you at all. I wonder why I
was born at all, since I was not to grow up like other boys. Why not?"

A question so strange, so sad, yet so often occurring in some form
or other in this world--as you will find, my children, when you are
older--that even if he had put it to his mother she could only have
answered it, as we have to answer many as difficult things, by simply
saying, "I don't know." There is much that we do not know and cannot
understand--we big folks no more than you little ones. We have to accept
it all just as you have to accept anything which your parents may
tell you, even though you don't as yet see the reason of it. You may
sometime, if you do exactly as they tell you, and are content to wait.

Prince Dolor sat a good while thus, or it appeared to him a good while,
so many thoughts came and went through his poor young mind--thoughts of
great bitterness, which, little though he was, seemed to make him grow
years older in a few minutes.

Then he fancied the cloak began to rock gently to and fro, with a
soothing kind of motion, as if he were in somebody's arms: somebody who
did not speak, but loved him and comforted him without need of words;
not by deceiving him with false encouragement or hope, but by making
him see the plain, hard truth in all its hardness, and thus letting him
quietly face it, till it grew softened down, and did not seem nearly so
dreadful after all.

Through the dreary silence and blankness, for he had placed himself so
that he could see nothing but the sky, and had taken off his silver ears
as well as his gold spectacles--what was the use of either when he had
no legs with which to walk or run?--up from below there rose a delicious
sound.

You have heard it hundreds of times, my children, and so have I. When I
was a child I thought there was nothing so sweet; and I think so still.
It was just the song of a skylark, mounting higher and higher from the
ground, till it came so close that Prince Dolor could distinguish his
quivering wings an