"There are no potatoes in your garden," answered the tall man, just as roughly as before; "there is nothing but flowers there for you to look at. But here in our garden we have no flowers to look at. We have to live in an ugly place, and do ugly work all day long, so that you should have your potatoes to eat."
"Dear me!" exclaimed the Princess; "I never met such a rude man before. Does he know I am the Princess, I wonder?" And she walked back hastily to the palace.
"We are very beautiful," said the flowers again, as her dress brushed against them. "Won't you look at us?"
But the Princess passed them by as before.
"Where do potatoes come from?" she asked, suddenly, at dinner-time. There was great consternation all round the table, for no one at the palace was ever supposed to know anything so common or useful as that. At last a strange and needy courtier, who had just come to apply for the post of Lord High Treasurer or anything else that was vacant, made a very good guess, as soon as he was quite certain that no one else knew anything whatever about it.
"They are washed up on the sea-shore at certain periods of the year," he said, and the King nodded at him gratefully, and felt that he would make a very useful foreign ambassador. But the Princess suggested that he should be offered the post of head gardener instead, as it was a pity so much useful learning should be wasted on a foreign ambassador. And the needy courtier, who had no sense of humor, gratefully accepted the post.
The next morning the Princess sent her page secretly to the hole in the hedge, and told him to bring the tall man back to speak with her. But the tall man sent her a message that he was too busy to come, and that the Princess must go to him if she had anything to say.
The little page trembled very much as he delivered this message.
"Shall I order him to be beheaded, your Highness?" he asked. The Princess's cheeks were smarting, but she merely smiled at the little page with a royal indifference.
"No," she said, "only Princes are beheaded." And when the little page was safely playing marbles with all the other pages in the anteroom, she opened her window and stepped out on the fresh dewy grass, and ran down the garden path as fast as she could. The flowers were silent this morning, and did not call out to her as she passed; but she noticed their silence no more than she had noticed their words the day before, for she had never understood their language.