TRAINS OF PRINCES BRINGING NASTY THINGS IN BOTTLES AND ROUND WOODEN BOXES.
The Princess had to sleep in the great Throne Room now, because no other room was big enough to hold her and her hair. When she woke in the morning the long high room would be quite full of her golden hair, packed tight and thick like wool in a barn. And every night when she had had the hair cut close to her head she would sit in her green silk gown by the window and cry, and kiss the little green caps she used to wear, and wish herself bald again.
It was as she sat crying there on Midsummer Eve that she first saw Prince Florizel.
He had come to the palace that evening, but he would not appear in her presence with the dust of travel on him, and she had retired with her hair borne by twenty pages before he had bathed and changed his garments and entered the reception-room.
Now he was walking in the garden in the moonlight, and he looked up and she looked down, and for the first time Melisande, looking on a Prince, wished that he might have the power to stop her hair from growing. As for the Prince, he wished many things, and the first was granted him. For he said—
“You are Melisande?”
“And you are Florizel?”
“There are many roses round your window,” said he to her, “and none down here.”
She threw him one of three white roses she held in her hand. Then he said—