Rosy jumped up, and kissed everybody around twice.
"Dear knows I've had enough of parties," she declared joyfully; but nobody knew what she meant!
BLONDINA;
OR,
THE TURKEY-QUEEN.
ACERTAIN king had two daughters, one of them lovely and accomplished, and the other an ugly, cross-tempered personage, who early in life took to meddling with the black arts, and learned a great deal more of magic than she did of any thing else. Blondina, on the contrary—for so the pretty princess was named—was the joy of all her nurses, and governesses, and tutors, and music masters, from earliest infancy. Her one fault was a tendency to laugh aloud on the slightest provocation. At ten years old she could speak many languages, play on all known instruments, write essays and sermons, dance like a sylph, sing like a nightingale, and make chocolate caramel. Vixetta, the elder of the two sisters, before she had reached the same age, had made short work of her instructors, wearing out the health and spirits of a governess in a week, and driving twenty-four tutors into the lunatic asylum, while her head-nurse was speedily reduced to skin and bone, and took a permanent situation as the living skeleton in a dime-museum.
Vixetta
The poor king remonstrated in vain with his headstrong elder daughter. Ordinary scolding had not the slightest effect upon her; black marks and crosses against her name in the report-book only made her laugh scornfully; and any attempt at bodily punishment ended in the Princess Vixetta throwing herself flat upon the ground, turning purple in the face, and foaming at the mouth with rage in a way to daunt the stoutest spirit. So, for this reason, the unfortunate girl was allowed to follow her own fancies, stealing off at dusk nobody knew whither, although it was suspected that her favorite haunts were the black depths of a pine forest near the palace—where the country folk never cared to ramble, even in broad daylight—or a certain ruined tower, filled with bats and owls and serpents. One night a peasant, who approached this tower in search of a lost cow, saw green lights dancing madly around the broken walls, heard wild shrieks of laughter issue from within, and, on venturing to insert his inquisitive nose into a chink, had it tweaked by two red-hot fingers; immediately afterward, he averred, he had seen the Princess Vixetta, in true witch-dress, shoot by him on a broom-stick, leaving a trail of brimstone in her wake. On reaching home he found his sheep dead, his best cows gone dry, and his children ill of a fever. Such tales as these, of which there were many current in the country-side, came from time to time to the king's ears, and not being able to gainsay them, because of information he had got on his own private account, the unfortunate parent resigned himself to sink slowly to the tomb. In fact he courted death rather than shunned it. Whenever he took cold, he would sit all night long, in wet shoes, in the draft of two open windows; and if that did not make him worse, would send away the doctors, refuse medicine, and try to beat his brains out on the marble floor of the palace bedroom. At last, one day, he choked, on too large a mouthful of beefsteak, and when the physicians endeavored to relieve him, waved them away, and cheerfully expired!