"Once on a time I was filled with bread,
But now I stand as if I were dead,"
mourned the basket.
"And why were you filled with bread?" asked Pet.
"Your mother used to fill me," squeaked the basket, "and give the bread out of me to feed the poor."
"Why! do you mean to say that the poor have no bread to eat?" asked Pet. "That is really a most dreadful thing. I must speak to my Government about these poor immediately. Whatever my mother did must have been perfectly right at all events, and I shall do the same!"
And off she went back towards her nursery, meeting all her twelve nurses flying along the corridors to look for her.
"Go directly and tell my Government that I want to speak to it," said Queen Pet, quite grandly; and she was brought down to the great Council Chamber.
"Your Majesty has had too much plum-pudding and a bad dream afterwards!" said the Government when Pet had told the whole story about the gowns, and the money, and the bread-basket, and the poor; and then the Government took a pinch of snuff and sent Queen Pet back to her nursery.
The next day, when all the nurses had gone to their dinner again, Pet was leaning out of her nursery window, with her two elbows on the sills and her face between her hands, and she was gazing down on the charming gardens below, and away off over the fields and hills of her beautiful kingdom of Goldenlands. "Where do the poor live, I wonder?" she thought; "and I wonder what they are like? Oh, that I could be a good queen like my mother, and be of use to my people! How I wish that I had a ladder to reach down into the garden, and then I could run away all over my kingdom and find things out for myself."
Just as she thought thus an exquisite butterfly perched on her finger and said gaily,—