'Where is the magic fish-bone?'

'In my pocket, papa.'

'I thought you had lost it?'

'O, no, papa.'

'Or forgotten it?'

'No, indeed, papa.'

After that, she ran up-stairs to the duchess, and told her what had
passed, and told her the secret over again; and the duchess shook
her flaxen curls, and laughed with her rosy lips.

Well! and so another time the baby fell under the grate. The
seventeen young princes and princesses were used to it; for they
were almost always falling under the grate or down the stairs; but
the baby was not used to it yet, and it gave him a swelled face and
a black eye. The way the poor little darling came to tumble was,
that he was out of the Princess Alicia's lap just as she was
sitting, in a great coarse apron that quite smothered her, in front
of the kitchen-fire, beginning to peel the turnips for the broth
for dinner; and the way she came to be doing that was, that the
king's cook had run away that morning with her own true love, who
was a very tall but very tipsy soldier. Then the seventeen young
princes and princesses, who cried at everything that happened,
cried and roared. But the Princess Alicia (who couldn't help
crying a little herself) quietly called to them to be still, on