he retirement of the wooden
one. And the Blue Bird and the Butterfly sing and flutter among the
lilies and roses of the Palace garden to this very day.

[Illustration: UNCLE JAMES OR THE PURPLE STRANGER]

II. Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger

The Princess and the gardener's boy were playing in the backyard.

"What will you do when you grow up, Princess?" asked the gardener's boy.

"I should like to marry you, Tom," said the Princess. "Would you mind?"

"No," said the gardener's boy. "I shouldn't mind much. I'll marry you if
you like--if I have time."

For the gardener's boy meant, as soon as he was grown up, to be a
general and a poet and a Prime Minister and an admiral and a civil
engineer. Meanwhile, he was top of all his classes at school, and
tip-top of the geography class.

As for the Princess Mary Ann, she was a very good little girl, and
everyone loved her. She was always kind and polite, even to her Uncle
James and to other people whom she did not like very much; and though
she was not very clever, for a Princess, she always tried to do her
lessons. Even if you know perfectly well that you can't do your lessons,
you may as well try, and sometimes you find that by some fortunate
accident they really _are_ done. Then the Princess had a truly good
heart: She was always kind to her pets. She never slapped her
hippopotamus when it broke her dolls in its playful gambols, and she
never forgot to feed her rhinoceroses in their little hutch in the
backyard. Her elephant was devoted to her, and sometimes Mary Ann made
her nurse quite cross by smuggling the dear little thing up to bed with
her and letting it go to sleep with its long trunk laid lovingly across
her throat, and its pretty head cuddled under the Royal right ear.

When the Princess had been good all through the week--for, like all
real, live, nice children, she was sometimes naughty, but never
bad--Nurse would allow her to ask her little friends to come on
Wednesday morning early and spend the day, because Wednesday is the end
of the week in that country. Then, in the afternoon, when all the little
dukes and duchesses and marquises and countesses had finished their rice
pudding and had had their hands and faces washed after it, Nurse would
say: "Now, my dears, what would you like to do this afternoon?" just as
if she didn't know. And the answer would be always the same:

"Oh, do let's go to the Zoological Gardens and ride on the big guinea