One day, wandering about in the palace, they came upon the closet in which hung the two little feather coats. “O!!!” they cried, and opened hard bright eyes at each other, nodding, for now they knew what they would do. “If we told, they would be taken off us,” they said; and they waited till it was night. Then they crept back and took the two little coats from their pegs, and, putting them on, were turned into two young herons. Through the window they flew, away down to the great fish-pond in the wood. Their father and mother saw them coming, and clapped their wings for joy. “See,” they said, “our children come to visit us, and our hearts are left to us to love with. What further happiness can we want?” But when they were not looking at each other they sighed. All night long the two young herons stayed with their parents; they bathed, and fished, and flew, till they were weary. Then the Princess showed them the nest among the reeds, and told them all the story of their lives. “But it is much nicer to be herons than to be real people,” said the young ones, sadly, and became very sorrowful when dawn drew on, and their mother told them to go back to the palace and hang up the feather coats again, and be as they had been the day before. Long, long the day now seemed to them; they hardly waited till it was night before they took down their feather-skins, and, putting them on, flew out and away to the fish-pond in the wood. So every night they went, when all in the palace were asleep; and in the morning came back before anyone was astir, and were found by their nurses lying demurely between the sheets, just as they had been left the night before. One day the Queen when she went to see her daughter said to her, “My child, your two children are growing less like human beings and more like birds every day. Nothing will they learn or do, but stand all day flapping their arms up and down, and saying, ‘Where are our wings, where are our wings?’ The idea of one of them ever coming to the throne makes your father’s hair stand on end under his crown.” “Oh, mother,” said the heron-Princess, “I have made a sad bed for you and my father to lie on!” One day the two children said to each other, “Our father and mother are sad, because they want to be real persons again, instead of having wings and catching fish the way we like to do. Let us give up being real persons, which is all so much trouble, and such a want of exercise, and make them exchange with us!” But when the two young herons went down to the pond and proposed it to them, their parents said, “You are young; you do not know what you would be giving up.” Nor would they consent to it at all.