Children's literature; Fairy tales; People with disabilities -- Juvenile fiction; Princes -- Juvenile fiction
For what do you think the clever godmother did? She took a quantity of
moonshine, or some equally convenient material, and made an image, which
she set on the window-sill reading, or by the table drawing, where it
looked so like Prince Dolor that any common observer would never have
guessed the deception; and even the boy would have been puzzled to know
which was the image and which was himself.
And all this while the happy little fellow was away, floating in the air
on his magic cloak, and seeing all sorts of wonderful things--or they
seemed wonderful to him, who had hitherto seen nothing at all.
First, there were the flowers that grew on the plain, which, whenever
the cloak came near enough, he strained his eyes to look at; they were
very tiny, but very beautiful--white saxifrage, and yellow lotus, and
ground-thistles, purple and bright, with many others the names of which
I do not know. No more did Prince Dolor, though he tried to find them
out by recalling any pictures he had seen of them. But he was too far
off; and though it was pleasant enough to admire them as brilliant
patches of color, still he would have liked to examine them all. He was,
as a little girl I know once said of a playfellow, “a very examining
boy.”
“I wonder,” he thought, “whether I could see better through a pair of
glasses like those my nurse reads with, and takes such care of. How I
would take care of them, too, if I only had a pair!”
Immediately he felt something queer and hard fixing itself to the bridge
of his nose. It was a pair of the prettiest gold spectacles ever seen;
and looking downward, he found that, though ever so high above the
ground, he could see every minute blade of grass, every tiny bud and
flower--nay, even the insects that walked over them.
“Thank you, thank you!” he cried, in a gush of gratitude--to anybody or
everybody, but especially to his dear godmother, who he felt sure had
given him this new present. He amused himself with it for ever so long,
with his chin pressed on the rim of the cloak, gazing down upon the
grass, every square foot of which was a mine of wonders.
Then, just to rest his eyes, he turned them up to the sky--the blue,
bright, empty sky, which he had looked at so often and seen nothing.
Now surely there was something. A long, black, wavy line, moving on
in the distance, not by chance, as the clouds move apparently, but
deliberately, as if it were alive. He might have seen it before--he
almost thought he had; but then he could not tell what it was. Looking
at it through his spectacles, he discovered that it really was alive;
being a long string of birds, flying one after the other, their wings
moving steadily and their heads pointed in one direction, as steadily as
if each were a little ship, guided invisibly by an unerring helm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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