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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1896. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

THE PRINCESS IN HER GARDEN.

BY EVELYN SHARP.

The Princess was walking in her garden. It was a very beautiful garden, full of many-colored flowers and rare exotics; but the Princess was not fond of flowers, and she walked down the path without looking at them at all, and she felt dreadfully dull. For she had quarrelled with her yesterday's lover, and had just sent him away, so she had no one left to tease, and was therefore without an occupation.

"We are very beautiful," whispered the flowers on each side of her. "Won't you look at us?"

"Only look at our exquisite coloring," simpered the scarlet begonias. "Surely you must admire us."

But the Princess wandered on listlessly until she came to the high prickly hedge at the end of her garden, and here she stopped because the path ended and she could go no further. She was feeling so dull, however, that she actually scratched her white hands in making a hole in the hedge so that she could look through and see what was on the other side. She had always been told that nothing outside the palace was at all amusing, but she felt sure that anything would be better than her secluded garden path and her beautiful, uninteresting flowers. So she yawned lazily, and held on her crown with both hands, and peeped through the hedge. To her surprise she saw nothing but potatoes growing, acres and acres of potatoes, stretching as far as her eye could reach, and in the middle of them all a tall man digging.

"Oh!" said the Princess, in a disappointed tone, "only potatoes! How dull!"

"Nonsense!" said the tall man, without turning round; "they are only grown for you to eat. If you don't want to see them growing, you must not expect to eat them."

"But I don't eat your potatoes," said the Princess, "because I have a garden of my own."

"There are no potatoes in your garden," answered the tall man, just as roughly as before; "there is nothing but flowers there for you to look at. But here in our garden we have no flowers to look at. We have to live in an ugly place, and do ugly work all day long, so that you should have your potatoes to eat."

"Dear me!" exclaimed the Princess; "I never met such a rude man before. Does he know I am the Princess, I wonder?" And she walked back hastily to the palace.

"We are very beautiful," said the flowers again, as her dress brushed against them. "Won't you look at us?"

But the Princess passed them by as before.

"Where do potatoes come from?" she asked, suddenly, at dinner-time. There was great consternation all round the table, for no one at the palace was ever supposed to know anything so common or useful as that. At last a strange and needy courtier, who had just come to apply for the post of Lord High Treasurer or anything else that was vacant, made a very good guess, as soon as he was quite certain that no one else knew anything whatever about it.

"They are washed up on the sea-shore at certain periods of the year," he said, and the King nodded at him gratefully, and felt that he would make a very useful foreign ambassador. But the Princess suggested that he should be offered the post of head gardener instead, as it was a pity so much useful learning should be wasted on a foreign ambassador. And the needy courtier, who had no sense of humor, gratefully accepted the post.

The next morning the Princess sent her page secretly to the hole in the hedge, and told him to bring the tall man back to speak with her. But the tall man sent her a message that he was too busy to come, and that the Princess must go to him if she had anything to say.

The little page trembled very much as he delivered this message.

"Shall I order him to be beheaded, your Highness?" he asked. The Princess's cheeks were smarting, but she merely smiled at the little page with a royal indifference.

"No," she said, "only Princes are beheaded." And when the little page was safely playing marbles with all the other pages in the anteroom, she opened her window and stepped out on the fresh dewy grass, and ran down the garden path as fast as she could. The flowers were silent this morning, and did not call out to her as she passed; but she noticed their silence no more than she had noticed their words the day before, for she had never understood their language.

The tall man was digging busily when she looked through the hole in the hedge, and now that the full light of day was on him she saw that he was very, very ugly, and had the wrinkled, tired face of an old man, although he was as straight and vigorous as a youth.

"I have come back," said the Princess, for she could not think of anything wiser to say. The tall man glanced round at her, and then went on digging.

"Why," she exclaimed, "do you know who I am?"

"Not in the least," said the tall man. "Who are you?"

She drew a long breath of astonishment. "I am the Princess," she said.

The man stopped digging, and looked at her for a moment.

"Is that all? No name?" he asked.

"Of course there's a name!" said the Princess, almost crying. "My real name is Gyldea, but Princess is enough for most people. Is it possible that you did not know who I was? Can't you see I am standing in my own garden?"

"Oh yes," said the tall man. "But you might have been the gardener's daughter, or one of the ladies-in-waiting, mightn't you?" And he returned to his digging.

"Did you get my message?" asked the Princess, fighting to keep back her angry tears.

"Let me see, there was a message of some sort," answered the tall man. "You sent for me, didn't you?"

"Yes," said the Princess, haughtily, "and you said I was to come and see you instead. It is positively shameful!"

"But you needn't have come, need you?" said the tall man.

Then the Princess stamped her tiny foot, and went away again up the garden path. And as she went she thought unconsciously of her yesterday's lover, the first one who had ever interested her at all; and she almost wished she had not sent him away, just because he did not dance well. It struck her now, for the first time, that perhaps there was something else he could do, such as digging potatoes, for instance.

"No, not digging potatoes!" she corrected herself, angrily, "that is a horrid, vulgar occupation. But something else, perhaps; for I dare say there are some people who do things that I have never heard of. I wonder what it feels like to do things of that description? Oh dear! I wish King Marigold would come back again!"

Her yesterday's lover had been a young King with a serious face, and the Princess could never bear people who looked serious; for, clearly, no one had any right to do that, unless he happened to be a beggar or a Prime Minister. All the same, she had wanted him back again ever since the tall man had been rude to her.

That evening there was a great ball at the palace. And the Princess was dressed for it by her eleven maids of honor; and they took three hours and a half over it, and only had twenty minutes left in which to dress themselves. When they came back again, the Princess Gyldea was gone, and no one knew where she was. The little page guessed, but he did not say anything, because he did not want to go down the garden path by moonlight, when the fairies were about, and might turn him into a frog or something unpleasant. Besides, the dew was falling, and he had his best dancing-shoes on, with real diamond buckles.

Sure enough, at the bottom of the garden, the Princess was again looking through the hole in the hedge.

"Are you still digging potatoes?" she asked.

"The potatoes have still to be dug," answered the tall man.

"I want you to come and dance instead," said the Princess, imperiously.

"Then who will dig your potatoes?" he asked.

"Some one else will dig them," said the Princess, who always found that when she wanted anything done it came to pass without any trouble.

"There is no one else," said the tall man. "Go away and dance."

"You are being an absurd child," laughed the tall man. "Why, you are on the wrong side of the hedge, to begin with."

"No," said the tall man, "I only know how dull it is to dig potatoes always, for some one else to eat. Go away and dance, you foolish child. Do you suppose you could dig potatoes in a dress like that?"

And the Princess looked down at her fine silken robes, and she went away up the garden path, more sadly than before.

"I have been walking in my garden," she said, when she found the King and the Queen and all the courtiers waiting for her, in the ballroom.

"She is so fond of flowers, the sweet child," said the Queen, trying to hide that she had been seriously alarmed; for the guests were beginning to arrive, and it would never do for them to suspect that anything unusual was happening.

"That is all very well," grumbled the King, who was not fond of balls; "but we must have the garden brought into the house or something, if she wants to do those things. I have been standing at the open door in my court suit for half an hour."

The next morning the Princess set to work to find a dress in which she could dig potatoes. But none of her own were simple enough; and when she asked her maids of honor if they had any old clothes, they were quite offended, and said they had never had such a thing in their lives. So she called her little page, who was teaching the cat to stand on its head in the anteroom; and she promised him a real sword in a gold sheath if he would find her an old dress to wear. But the little page came back again, in an hour's time, and said there was not an old dress to be had in the palace.

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