lessons; it was as naughty as a child could be. The parents were very
sorrowful; the heir, so longed for, promised to be a great plague to
themselves and their subjects. At last one day, to add to their
trouble, two little bumps appeared on the prince's shoulders. All the
doctors were consulted as to the cause and the cure of this deformity.
Of course they tried the effect of back-bands and steel machines,
which gave the poor little prince great pain, and made him more
unamiable than ever. The bumps, nevertheless, grew larger, and as
they increased, so the prince sickened and pined away. At last a
skilful surgeon proposed, as the only chance of saving the prince's
life, that the bumps should be cut out; and the next morning was fixed
for that operation. But at night the queen saw, or dreamed she saw, a
beautiful shape standing by her bedside. And it said to her
reproachfully, 'Ungrateful woman! How wouldst thou repay me for the
precious boon that my favour bestowed on thee! In me behold the Queen
of the Fairies. For the heir to thy kingdom, I consigned to thy
charge an infant from Fairyland, to become a blessing to thee and to
thy people; and thou wouldst inflict upon it a death of torture by the
surgeon's knife.' And the queen answered, 'Precious indeed thou mayest
call the boon,--a miserable, sickly, feverish changeling.'

"'Art thou so dull,' said the beautiful visitant, 'as not to
comprehend that the earliest instincts of the fairy child would be
those of discontent, at the exile from its native home? and in that
discontent it would have pined itself to death, or grown up, soured
and malignant, a fairy still in its power but a fairy of wrath and
evil, had not the strength of its inborn nature sufficed to develop
the growth of its wings. That which thy blindness condemns as the
deformity of the human-born, is to the fairy-born the crowning
perfection of its beauty. Woe to thee, if thou suffer not the wings