rain was thus falling, and the leaves, and the flowers, and the
sheep, and the cattle, and the hedgehog, were all busily receiving
the golden rain, something happened. It was not a great battle, nor
an earthquake, nor a coronation, but something more important than
all those put together. A BABY-GIRL WAS BORN; and her father was a
king; and her mother was a queen; and her uncles and aunts were
princes and princesses; and her first-cousins were dukes and
duchesses; and not one of her second-cousins was less than a marquis
or marchioness, or of their third-cousins less than an earl or
countess: and below a countess they did not care to count. So the
little girl was Somebody; and yet for all that, strange to say, the
first thing she did was to cry. I told you it was a strange country.

As she grew up, everybody about her did his best to convince her
that she was Somebody; and the girl herself was so easily persuaded
of it that she quite forgot that anybody had ever told her so, and
took it for a fundamental, innate, primary, first-born, self-
evident, necessary, and incontrovertible idea and principle that SHE
WAS SOMEBODY. And far be it from me to deny it. I will even go so
far as to assert that in this odd country there was a huge number of
Somebodies. Indeed, it was one of its oddities that every boy and
girl in it, was rather too ready to think he or she was Somebody;
and the worst of it was that the princess never thought of there
being more than one Somebody--and that was herself.

Far away to the north in the same country, on the side of a bleak
hill, where a horse-chestnut or a sycamore was never seen, where
were no meadows rich with buttercups, only steep, rough, breezy
slopes, covered with dry prickly furze and its flowers of red gold,
or moister, softer broom with its flowers of yellow gold, and great