The Emperor was very angry and impatient one day with a woman who expressed some of this regret, and told her she was ungrateful; yet it was obviously not ingratitude that prompted her to speak, but rather a wistful retrospect, a sorrowful longing for the scenes associated with all the joys she had ever known. Even the duck-pond, that enchanted spot where the Princess from her window watched every evening the farm horses as they waded in and drank delicately just in the yellow and scarlet glory of the sunset, where the herd of cows came and stood in the water, switching their tails and taking long, deliberate draughts every evening after milking-time--all was done away with, the pond filled up, the green levelled and kept smoothly rolled. No children or dogs played on it any more, the horses and cattle went another way home, and sentries, those adjutants of royalty, were posted where erstwhile the geese had waddled across the grass. Fortunately it was some time before all these improvements were made. No sentries marred those early years in Cadinen. Only one or two green _Gendarms_ wandered about the place or sat somnolently in the sunshine. The clink of the blacksmith’s shop penetrated the open windows of the schoolroom as the Princess read with her tutor. The blacksmith was a most delightful man, who had been at sea and travelled far afield, and was still young and handsome, with a pleasant-faced wife and two little children, one of whom, Lenchen, squinted most frightfully, but was a great friend of the Princess. “Every year it seems to me that Lenchen squints worse,” she would sigh after the first interview; “but perhaps it is because I haven’t seen her for so long. She is going to be operated on next winter. She would be quite pretty if her eyes were right.” A village forge has been from time immemorial an irresistible attraction to children, and it was surprising how all roads in Cadinen seemed somehow to lead past the blacksmith’s, who was always either fitting shoes on horses, or mending a ploughshare, or doing something interesting of that kind. “So useful,” said the Princess as she gazed--“so much better than learning the date of the Silesian Wars, isn’t it?” Sometimes she helped to blow the bellows.