Now Hazen’s father was a king. And it chanced that while Hazen was yet a little boy, the king of a neighbour country came and took Hazen’s father’s kingdom, and killed all the court--for that was the way neighbour countries did in those days, not knowing that neighbours are nearly one’s own family. They took little Hazen prisoner and carried him to the conquering king’s court, and they did it in such a hurry that he had not time to take anything with him. All his belongings--his tops, his football, his books, and his bank, had to be left behind, and among the things that were left was Hazen’s little glass casket, forgotten on a closet shelf, upstairs in the castle. And the castle was shut up and left as it was, because the conquering king thought that maybe he might like sometime to give to his little daughter, the Princess Vista, this castle, which stood on the very summit of a sovereign mountain and commanded a great deal of the world. In the court of the conquering king poor little Hazen grew up, and he was not wise or _really_ good or loved or beautiful, and he forgot about the casket or thought of it only as a dream, and he did not know that he was a prince. He was a poor little furnace boy and kitchen-fire builder in the king’s palace, and he slept in the basement and did nothing from morning till night but attend to drafts and dampers. He did not see the king at all, and he had never even caught a glimpse of the king’s little daughter, the Princess Vista. * * * * * One morning before daylight Hazen was awakened by the alarm-in-a-basin at the head of his cot--for he was always so tired that just an alarm never wakened him at all, but set in a brazen basin an alarm would waken _anybody_. He dressed and hurried through the long, dim passages that led to the kitchens, and there he kindled the fires and tended the drafts and shovelled the coal that should cook the king’s breakfast. Suddenly a Thought spoke to him. It said:-- “Hazen, you are not wise, or _really_ good, or loved, or beautiful. Why don’t you become so?” “I,” Hazen thought back sadly, “_I_ become these things? Impossible!” and he went on shovelling coal. But still the Thought spoke to him, and said the same thing over and over so many times that at last he was obliged to listen and even to answer. “What would I do to be like that?” he asked almost impatiently. “First go up in the king’s library,” said the Thought. So when the fires were roaring and the dampers were right, Hazen went softly up the stair and through the quiet lower rooms of the palace, for it was very early in the morning, and no one was stirring. Hazen had been so seldom above stairs that he did not even know where the library was and by mistake he opened successively the doors to the great banquet room, the state drawing rooms, a morning room, and even the king’s audience chamber before at last he chanced on the door of the library.