CHAPTER I

THE KING OF EURALIA HAS A VISITOR TO BREAKFAST

King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning anything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

“Ah,” said the King, “here you are, my dear.” He searched for his napkin, but the Princess had already kissed him lightly on the top of the head, and was sitting in her place opposite to him.

“Good morning, Father,” she said; “I’m a little late, aren’t I? I’ve been riding in the forest.”

“Any adventures?” asked the King casually.

“Nothing, except it’s a beautiful morning.”

“Ah, well, perhaps the country isn’t what it was. Now when I was a young man, you simply couldn’t go into the forest without an adventure of some sort. The extraordinary things one encountered! Witches, giants, dwarfs —— . It was there that I first met your mother,” he added thoughtfully.

“I wish I remembered my mother,” said Hyacinth.

The King coughed and looked at her a little nervously.

“Seventeen years ago she died, Hyacinth, when you were only six months old. I have been wondering lately whether I haven’t been a little remiss in leaving you motherless so long.”

The Princess looked puzzled. “But it wasn’t your fault, dear, that mother died.”

“Oh, no, no, I’m not saying that. As you know, a dragon carried her off and — well, there it was. But supposing” — he looked at her shyly— “I had married again.”

The Princess was startled.

“Who?” she asked.

The King peered into his flagon. “Well,” he said, “thereare people.”

“If it had been somebodyvery nice,” said the Princess wistfully, “it might have been rather lovely.”

The King gazed earnestly at the outside of his flagon.

“Why ‘might have been?’” he said.

The Princess was still puzzled. “But I’m grown up,” she said; “I don’t want a mother so much now.”

The King turned his flagon round and studied the other side of it.

“A mother’s — er — tender hand,” he said, “is — er — never — —” and then the outrageous thing happened.

It was all because of a birthday present to the King of Barodia, and the present was nothing less than a pair of seven-league boots. The King being a busy man, it was a week or more before he had an opportunity of trying those boots. Meanwhile he used to talk about them at meals, and he would polish them up every night before he went to bed. When the great day came for the first trial of them to be made, he took a patronising farewell of his wife and family, ignored the many eager noses pressed against the upper windows of the Palace, and sailed off. The motion, as perhaps you know, is a little disquieting at first, but one soon gets used to it. After that it is fascinating. He had gone some two thousand miles before he realised that there might be a difficulty about finding his way back. The difficulty proved at least as great as he had anticipated. For the rest of that day he toured backwards and forwards across the country; and it was by the merest accident that a very angry King shot in through an open pantry window in the early hours of the morning. He removed his boots and went softly to bed. . . .

It was, of course, a lesson to him. He decided that in the future he must proceed by a recogn