in arranging her train with one hand, while she held the baby with
the other, that she stumbled and let him fall, just at the foot of the
marble staircase.

To be sure, she contrived to pick him up again the next minute; and the
accident was so slight it seemed hardly worth speaking of. Consequently
nobody did speak of it. The baby had turned deadly pale, but did not
cry, so no person a step or two behind could discover anything wrong;
afterward, even if he had moaned, the silver trumpets were loud enough
to drown his voice. It would have been a pity to let anything trouble
such a day of felicity.

So, after a minute's pause, the procession had moved on. Such a
procession t Heralds in blue and silver; pages in crimson and gold; and
a troop of little girls in dazzling white, carrying baskets of flowers,
which they strewed all the way before the nurse and child--finally the
four-and-twenty godfathers and godmothers, as proud as possible, and so
splendid to look at that they would have quite extinguished their small
godson--merely a heap of lace and muslin with a baby face inside--had it
not been for a canopy of white satin and ostrich feathers which was held
over him wherever he was carried.

Thus, with the sun shining on them through the painted windows, they
stood; the king and his train on one side, the Prince and his attendants
on the other, as pretty a sight as ever was seen out of fairyland.

"It's just like fairyland," whispered the eldest little girl to the next
eldest, as she shook the last rose out of her basket; "and I think the
only thing the Prince wants now is a fairy god-mother."