After a prosperous voyage, Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the old shepherd, arrived in safety at the court of Leontes. Leontes, who still mourned his dead Hermione and his lost child, received Camillo with great kindness and gave a cordial welcome to Prince Florizel. But Perdita, whom Florizel introduced as his princess, seemed to engross all Leontes’s attention. Perceiving a resemblance between her and his dead queen Hermione, his grief broke out afresh, and he said such a lovely creature might his own daughter have been if he had not so cruelly destroyed her. “And then, too,” said he to Florizel, “I lost the society and friendship of your brave father, whom I now desire more than my life once again to look upon.” When the old shepherd heard how much notice the king had taken of Perdita, and that he had lost a daughter who was exposed in infancy, he fell to comparing the time when he found the little Perdita with the manner of its exposure, the jewels and other tokens of its high birth; from all which it was impossible for him not to conclude that Perdita and the king’s lost daughter were the same. Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the faithful Paulina, were present when the old shepherd related to the king the manner in which he had found the child, and also the circumstance of Antigonus’s death, he having seen the bear seize upon him. He showed the rich mantle in which Paulina remembered Hermione had wrapped the child; and he produced a jewel which she remembered Hermione had tied about Perdita’s neck; and he gave up the paper which Paulina knew to be the writing of her husband. It could not be doubted that Perdita was Leontes’s own daughter. But, oh, the noble struggles of Paulina, between sorrow for her husband’s death and joy that the oracle was fulfilled, in the king’s heir, his long-lost daughter being found! When Leontes heard that Perdita was his daughter, the great sorrow that he felt that Hermione was not living to behold her child made him that he could say nothing for a long time but “Oh, thy mother, thy mother!” Paulina interrupted this joyful yet distressful scene with saying to Leontes that she had a statue newly finished by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, which was such a perfect resemblance of the queen that would his Majesty be pleased to go to her house and look upon it, be would be almost ready to think it was Hermione herself. Thither then they all went; the king, anxious to see the semblance of his Hermione, and Perdita longing to behold what the mother she never saw did look like. When Paulina drew back the curtain which concealed this famous statue, so perfectly did it resemble Hermione that all the king’s sorrow was renewed at the sight; for a long time he had no power to speak or move. “I like your silence, my liege,” said Paulina; “it the more shows your wonder. Is not this statue very like your queen?”