engross all Leontes' attention: perceiving a resemblance between her
and his dead queen Hermione, his grief broke out afresh, and he said,
such a lovely creature might his own daughter have been, if he had not
so cruelly destroyed her. "And then too," said he to Florizel, "I lost
the society and friendship of your brave father, whom I now desire
more than my life once again to look upon."

When the old shepherd heard how much notice the king had taken of
Perdita, and that he had lost a daughter, who was exposed in infancy,
he fell to comparing the time when he found the little Perdita with
the manner of its exposure, the jewels and other tokens of its high
birth; from all which it was impossible for him not to conclude, that
Perdita and the king's lost daughter were the same.

Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the faithful Paulina, were present
when the old shepherd related to the king the manner in which he had
found the child, and also the circumstance of Antigonus's death,
he having seen the bear seize upon him. He shewed the rich mantle
in which Paulina remembered Hermione had wrapped the child; and
he produced a jewel which she remembered Hermione had tied about
Perdita's neck, and he gave up the paper which Paulina knew to be
the writing of her husband; it could not be doubted that Perdita was
Leontes' own daughter: but oh! the noble struggles of Paulina, between
sorrow for her husband's death, and joy that the oracle was fulfilled,
in the king's heir, his long-lost daughter, being found. When Leontes
heard that Perdita was his daughter, the great sorrow that he felt
that Hermione was not living to behold her child, made him that he
could say nothing for a long time, but "O thy mother, thy mother!"

Paulina interrupted this joyful yet distressful scene, with saying to