But the third princess received the minister very graciously, and told him that once she had been quite determined to have only such a husband as could play on the Jew’s-harp; but that now, after all, she had come to the conclusion that dreams are flighty, especially the dreams of youth. She saw now, she said, that the realisation of her wish was quite out of the question, and as she had taken a fancy to the king she was willing to have him. Then the minister drove home as fast as his horses would go, and the king embraced him, and gave him a tremendous medal to wear about his neck. Bright flags decorated the town, garlands were hung from house to house across the streets, and altogether the wedding was such a splendid affair that nothing else was talked of for the next fortnight. The king and the young queen lived in a state of bliss and rapture for the space of an entire year. The king never thought of ginger-nuts, and that little matter of the Jew’s-harp had quite slipped out of the queen’s mind. [Illustration: “WITHOUT ANOTHER WORD THEY BOTH WALKED AWAY.”] But one morning the king got up with his wrong leg first, and everything went wrong. It rained the whole day long; the imperial globe fell down, and the little cross on top of it broke off; then the court painter came and brought the new map of the kingdom, and when the king looked at it he found that the land was painted red instead of blue, as he had ordered it; and besides all this, the queen had a headache. So it happened that the couple had their first quarrel; what it was all about they themselves did not know next morning, or if they did know it they did not want to say. In short, the king grumbled and the queen pouted and would always have the last word. After they had wrangled for some time, the queen shrugged her shoulders contemptuously and said-- “It seems to me you might be silent, and stop finding fault with everything you set your eyes on, when you yourself don’t even know how to play on the Jew’s-harp.” But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than the king petulantly interrupted her with the words, “And you cannot so much as bake ginger-nuts!” Thereupon the queen for the first time had no repartee upon her tongue’s end, and succumbed into silence, and without another word they both walked away. The queen sat down in a corner of her sofa in her own room, weeping bitterly, and thinking, “What a foolish woman I am! Where did I have my senses? That was the silliest thing I could have done!” The king walked up and down in his room, gleefully rubbing his hands, and saying, “What a piece of good fortune it is that my wife doesn’t know how to bake ginger-nuts! If she did, I should have been sadly put to for an answer when she reproached me for being unable to play on the Jew’s-harp!”