Some poor little girls were playing in the field. Their feet were bare and their faded frocks were torn, but they danced and sang too. There came a rumbling like thunder, and through a gap in the hawthorn hedge the children and the daisies saw the King’s little daughter driven past in her great scarlet coach drawn by eight dappled horses. They could see the little Princess sitting up very straight with her crinoline puffing about her and her crown on her head, and after she had passed all the children played that they were princesses, making daisy crowns for their heads, and hoops of brier boughs to hold out their limp little petticoats. [Illustration] The next day the Princess looked in vain for a daisy as she took her morning constitutional in the Royal gardens. There were roses and lilies, blue irises, and striped red and yellow carnations tied to stakes, all stiff and straight. “Hold up your head, Serene Highness!” snapped one of the Ladies-In-Waiting, who had had too many cherry tarts at too late an hour the night before. But daisies danced in the Princess’s heart. The next night the Princess dreamed that she was a little white cloud afloat in the bright blue sky. She floated over the blue sea and the white sand, and over black forests of whispering pines, and over a land where fields of tulips bloomed for miles, in squares of lovely colors, delicate rose and mauve and purple, coppery pink and creamy yellow, with canals running through them like strips of old, dark looking-glass. She floated over rye fields turning silver in the wind, and over nuns at work in their walled gardens, and finally over a great grim palace where a King’s little daughter lived. “I would rather be free and afloat in the sky,” thought the small white cloud. When she took the air the next day, she looked up to see if any white clouds were in the sky. “Her Highness is growing very proud,” said the Ladies-In-Waiting. “She holds her nose up in the air as a King’s daughter should.” [Illustration] On the third night, the Princess dreamed she was a little lamb skipping and nibbling the new green grass in a meadow where hundreds of lilies of the valley were in bloom. They were still wet and sparkling with rain, but now the sun shone and a beautiful rainbow arched above the meadow and the lilies of the valley and the happy little lamb. [Illustration] Through the rest of her life the gentleness of the lamb lay in the heart of the Princess. The next night she dreamed that she was a white butterfly drifting with other butterflies among the tree ferns and orchids of the jungle, gentle and safe from harm, although serpents lay among the branches of the trees and lions and tigers roamed through the green shadows. [Illustration] A white butterfly flew in at her window the next day. “A moth! A moth!” cried the Ladies-In-Waiting. “Camphor and boughs of cedar must be procured instantly, or the dreadful creature will eat up Her Highness’s ermine robes!”