“In the boot you will find various things that may be useful on the journey; they are every one of them yours. You open the boot as you would shell a green pea. There you will see three caskets, the shape and size of a pea, each fastened by a thread which keeps them in their cases like peas in a pod, so that they cannot jolt against each other when you travel or when you remove them. It is a wonderful contrivance! “They will open at the pressure of your finger—like the hood of my carriage. Then all you have to do is to make a hole in the ground with your hoe, and sow some of their contents in it, to see whatever you may wish spring up, sprout and blossom. Is not that wonderful? “Only remember this!—when the third casket is empty I have nothing else to offer you; for I have only three green peas, just as you had three measures of beans; and the prettiest girl in the world can give you no more than she has. “Are you ready to set out now?” The Luck of the Bean-rows bowed; he felt that he could not speak. Pea-Blossom snapped her thumb and middle finger: “Off, chick pea!” she cried; and the field of sweet peas was left nine hundred miles behind while Luck of the Bean-rows was still turning this way and that, looking in vain for Pea-Blossom. “Alas!” he sighed. It would be doing scant justice to the speed of the magic carriage to say that it shot through space at the rate of a rifle bullet. Woods, towns, mountains, seas swept by quicker than magic lantern pictures. Far away horizons had scarcely risen in outline from the deep-down distance before they had plunged under the flying carriage. The Luck would have striven in vain to see them; when he turned to look back—flick! they had gone. At last, when he had several times outraced the sun, swept round the globe, caught it up and again outstripped it, with rapid changes from day to night and from night to day, it suddenly struck the Luck of the Bean-rows that he had passed the great town he was going to and the market for his beans. “The springs of this carriage are a trifle lively,” he thought to himself (he was nimble-witted, remember); “it started off on its giddy race before Pea-Blossom could tell me whither I was bound. I don’t see why this journey should not last for ages and ages, for that lovely princess, who is young enough to be something of a madcap, told me how to start the carriage, but had no time to say how I was to stop it.” The Luck of the Bean-rows tried all the cries he had heard from carters, wagoners, and muleteers to bring it to a standstill, but it was all to no purpose. Every shout seemed but to quicken its wild career. It sped from the tropics to the poles and back from the poles to the tropics, across all the parallels and meridians, quite unconcerned by the unhealthy changes of temperature. It was enough to broil them or to turn them to ice before long, if the Luck had not been gifted, as we have frequently remarked, with admirable intelligence.