select portions for you to read that are suitable to your age and
interests. Perhaps you are very imaginative, and prefer fairy tales to
all others. I am sure, then, that you will like the story I am about
to tell you, of a little French princess, who was married and crowned
Queen of England when only eight years old, and who became a widow at
twelve.

This child-sovereign was born many hundred years ago--in 1387--at the
palace of the Louvre in Paris, of whose noble picture-gallery I am
sure you all have heard,--if, indeed, many of you have not seen it
yourselves. She was the daughter of the poor King Charles VI., whose
misfortunes made him insane, and for whose amusement playing-cards
were invented, and of his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, a beautiful but
very wicked woman. Little Princess Isabella was the eldest of twelve
children. She inherited her mother's beauty, and was petted by her
parents and the entire court of France.

King Richard II. of England, who was a widower about thirty years old,
was urged to marry again; and, instead of selecting a wife near his
own age, his choice fell upon little Princess Isabella.

"She is much too young," he was told. "Even in five or six years she
will not be old enough to be married." The king, however, thought
this objection too trifling to stand in the way of his marriage, and
saying, "The lady's age is a fault that every day will remedy," he
sent a magnificent embassy to the court of France, headed by the
Archbishop of Dublin, and consisting of earls, marshals, knights, and
squires of honor uncounted, with attendants to the number of five
hundred.