There was once a young prince who wished to take a wife. So he went to consult his aunt, who was by way of being a Wise Woman. “Next week,” he said, “the King of the Land-on-the-other-side-of-the-Mountains is holding a great festival in honour of the coming of age of his son, and he has invited me to stay at the Court. There will be many beautiful ladies there, and I am hoping that I may be able to find a wife among them. But how shall I know which to choose?” “You shall have my advice and welcome,” said his aunt. “Choose a maiden who laughs when others cry, and cries when others laugh, and you will not go far wrong.” The prince thanked his aunt for her counsel and went back home. He thought the advice she had given him rather strange, but he had great confidence in her wisdom. “And in any case,” he said, “I can but go to the festival and see what comes of it.” There were indeed many lovely ladies at the Court of the King of the Land-on-the-other-side-of-the-Mountains. The prince was quite dazzled by their beauty and their wit. Each of them seemed more charming than the last. On the second day of the fête a picnic had been arranged which was to take place in a woodland glade some little way from the palace. The road thither was rough and very muddy, for there had been much rain the week before. The princes and knights rode on horseback; the ladies were conveyed in carriages gaily decked with flowers and drawn by beautiful prancing horses. But it so happened that the horses of one of the carriages became unmanageable. It turned over, and the six ladies who rode in it were all tumbled into the ditch at the side of the road. It was a rather deep ditch, and there was water at the bottom of it, so that it was quite a business getting them all out, though fortunately none of them was seriously hurt. The prince, who happened to be riding beside the carriage, helped to rescue them, and escorted them one by one, weeping, to a seat on the bank, where they presented a sorry spectacle with their pretty frocks all muddy and bedraggled and their pretty hats all on one side. But when the prince came to the sixth lady he found her, to his great astonishment, sitting at the bottom of the ditch, laughing. Her hat had come off, her hair had come down, she was bedaubed with mud from head to foot, and her poor little hands were covered with nettle stings. But she laughed all the same. “We must have looked so funny all tumbling into the ditch,” she said. “I wish I could have seen it. We’re still rather a funny sight, aren’t we?”--and she looked down at herself and up at the weeping ladies on the bank, and laughed again. [Illustration] There was so much mud on her face that the prince could not see what she really looked like, but he remembered the words of his aunt. “What is the name of the sixth lady?” he asked, when they had all been bundled off home. “The one who laughed?” “Her name is Mellidora,” he was told.