“Not me!” snorted the old soldier, taking a pinch of snuff. “Stand on your head if you like, but I’m going to travel right side up or not at all. Do you want to break your neck?” he demanded indignantly.
“It would be a little rough,” admitted Tatters, remembering the way the stones had bumped, “but it’s pretty good magic just the same.” Grampa grunted contemptuously and tightened the fastenings of his game leg, but even the old soldier could not stay cross long in this enchanting garden, and when a moment later they happened upon a cluster of peach trees he grew quite cheerful again.
“Always did like peaches for breakfast,” he sighed, impaling one on his sword. Twirling the sword and taking little bites all round, he looked with half closed eyes down the long vistas of lantern lanes. “I wish Mrs Sew-and-Sew could see this,” sighed the old soldier pensively. Tatters nodded, but he was impatient to see more of the wizard’s garden, so filling his pocket with peaches, he ran down the narrowest of the lanes after Bill, who had already flown ahead to have another look for the fortune. Opening out from this lane was a smaller and enclosed garden filled with the strangest bushes Tatters ever had seen. Each one grew in the shape of an animal. There were bears, tigers, lions, elephants and deer and the eyes, noses and mouths were marked by blossoms of the proper size and shape, that grew cunningly just where they were needed. They looked so life-like that for a moment the Prince was frightened, but after he had prodded a lion bush with his umbrella and it neither roared nor lashed its green tail he proceeded from one to the other quite as if he were in a museum. And certainly Gorba’s animals were queer enough to grace any museum.
“Wonder how he makes ’em grow this way?” murmured Tatters, finishing his last peach.
“Might as well wonder how he happens to be a wizard,” chuckled Grampa, who had come up quietly behind him. “Why, this is better than a zoo, it’s a whole blooming menagerie, and if we knew the secret of it we could travel all over Oz growing deer and rabbit bushes in the castle gardens and your fortune would be made in no time. But as we don’t know the secret of it,” concluded Grampa, squinting at his old silver watch, “we’d better forward march and see if we can find a way out of here.” With many backward glances, Tatters followed him down another of the lantern lanes, but they had scarcely gone half way when the hoarse voice of the weather cock came screeching overhead.
“The Princess! The Princess! I have found the Princess!” crowed Bill, falling with an iron clang in the path before them.
“Be quiet,” warned the old soldier anxiously, “do you want the wizard to get you? Now then, what’s all this nonsense about a Princess?” Grampa winked at Tatters and Tatters winked back, for neither of them had much faith in Bill’s discoveries. But the weather cock was too excited to mind. Hopping stiffly ahead and pausing every few seconds to urge them forward with a wave of his wing, he led them to the very center of the enchanted garden. There, on a bed of softest moss, surrounded by a rose blown hedge, lay the loveliest little maiden you could ever imagine!
“The Princess,” repeated Bill huskily. “The Princess!”
“You’re wrong,” breathed the old soldier, pushing back his cap and tip-toeing forward, “you’re wrong. It’s the Queen of the May!” And it surely seemed that Grampa had guessed correctly, for Bill’s Princess was a little Lady of Flowers. Her face, hands and neck were of the tiniest white blossoms, her eyes, deep blue violets, her mouth a rose bud and her nose and brows delicately marked with pink stems. Her hair, blowing backward and forward in the fragrant breeze, was the finest spray of flowering fern, and her dress was most enchanting of all. The waist was of every soft, silken flower you could think of, buttoned all the way down the front with pansies, while her skirts—a thick cluster of blossoming vines—fluttered gaily about her tiny lady slippers.
“Why!” exclaimed the Prince of Ragbad, “she’s growing in the flower bed. Oh, Grampa, if she were only alive!”