Then, stretching himself, for he had been evidently half asleep, he began flopping his shoulders with his arms to wake and warm himself; while his dog, a rough collie, who had been guarding the sheep meanwhile, began to jump upon him, barking with delight. “Down, Snap, down: Stop that, or I'll thrash you,” the Prince heard him say; though with such a rough, hard voice and queer pronunciation that it was difficult to make the words out. “Hollo! Let's warm ourselves by a race.” They started off together, boy and dog--barking and shouting, till it was doubtful which made the more noise or ran the faster. A regular steeplechase it was: first across the level common, greatly disturbing the quiet sheep; and then tearing away across country, scrambling through hedges and leaping ditches, and tumbling up and down over plowed fields. They did not seem to have anything to run for--but as if they did it, both of them, for the mere pleasure of motion. And what a pleasure that seemed! To the dog of course, but scarcely less so to the boy. How he skimmed along over the ground--his cheeks glowing, and his hair flying, and his legs--oh, what a pair of legs he had! Prince Dolor watched him with great intentness, and in a state of excitement almost equal to that of the runner himself--for a while. Then the sweet, pale face grew a trifle paler, the lips began to quiver, and the eyes to fill. “How nice it must be to run like that!” he said softly, thinking that never--no, never in this world--would he be able to do the same. Now he understood what his godmother had meant when she gave him his traveling-cloak, and why he had heard that sigh--he was sure it was hers--when he had asked to see “just one little boy.” “I think I had rather not look at him again,” said the poor little Prince, drawing himself back into the center of his cloak, and resuming his favorite posture, sitting like a Turk, with his arms wrapped round his feeble, useless legs. “You're no good to me,” he said, patting them mournfully. “You never will be any good to me. I wonder why I had you at all. I wonder why I was born at all, since I was not to grow up like other boys. Why not?” A question so strange, so sad, yet so often occurring in some form or other in this world--as you will find, my children, when you are older--that even if he had put it to his mother she could only have answered it, as we have to answer many as difficult things, by simply saying, “I don't know.” There is much that we do not know and cannot understand--we big folks no more than you little ones. We have to accept it all just as you have to accept anything which your parents may tell you, even though you don't as yet see the reason of it. You may sometime, if you do exactly as they tell you, and are content to wait.