But for many months everything went on beautifully at Bamboo Castle and the Prince and Wild Flower were deliciously happy. It was very nice to have a magnificent home, and a lake full of gold fish, and a shady garden where fountains trickled drops of music, and little crystal streams rushed over the rocks and sang to the lilies on their banks. And it was pleasant to wear lovely clothes, and eat sharks’ fins and birds’ nest soup and bamboo shoots and lotus bulbs and other delicacies that only very rich people can have in Japan. And she was glad to think she wasn’t a fox, hiding out in brier patches, always listening for dogs and sometimes hungry. Surely it was much better to be a Princess than a fox.
Then gradually a change came over her, and although she had everything she wanted, she was no longer happy. Sometimes in the day when she lingered by the lake and watched the little gold fish dart about like flames in the clear water and jump up on the bank to get the lard cakes and rice balls she had brought them, she sighed, and for no reason at all scolded the mincing, bias-eyed lady who carried a gorgeous parasol over her.
And again in the starlit night, when she walked in the perfumed garden and listened to the musical drip, drip of the fountain, and heard the frogs calling to each other from the lotus pools, there came to her the memory of an enchanted land, where bats circled and shrieked, and great owls squatted solemnly on the knotty branches of the trees, winking and blinking and never sleeping, and a mighty dragon with glaring eyes and shining scales lived in a hollow tree. And strange to say, when she remembered this dark and lonely forest her own garden seemed to her but a stupid place.
After a while she grew tired of living in a house, even if it was a Bamboo Castle, and whenever she went out having men carry her about in a stuffy chair, and she longed for the shade of the far-away wood, the sound of the hoarsely gurgling streams, for a run in the early morning through the dew-laden grass, for the hum of the bees, the smell of the dead leaves and a nap on a mossy bank.
So she fretted and grew so discontented that ugly lines crept in between her brows, the rose all went out of her cheeks, and she was so cross the Prince was once heard to say he had married a nettle in place of a wild flower. She slapped her servants, quarreled with her mother-in-law (which in Japan is an awful thing to do), and was altogether as disagreeable as a woman could be. The Prince was patient. He stood it for a long time without saying a word and tried in every way to please his royal lady. One day he asked:
“Is there nothing, Fair One, would make you kind and sweet again? If anything will make you happy, only say what it is and I will go even to the ends of the earth for it.”
After thinking a moment the Princess answered:
“Take me back to the forest where you found me. If I could only see that dear place again I would be content ever after. But leave the cruel leopards behind,” she added quickly.
“There is much game there,” he said regretfully. But she frowned and stamped her little foot angrily.
“You shall not kill anything,” she declared. “If you do you will break my heart.”