“Well, just where you see the steeple rising and the glint of the sun on the weathercock is the High Street. It’s a wide road, with windows looking down on it from either side; and at the end, as you go to the docks, is an old house with carved gable-ends, and in a niche of its wall is the statue of a man.”
“And is that the man the story is about?” inquired little Peter.
“The same,” said the miller. “But, to tell you about him, I must begin somewhere very far away from the place where the old statue stands.”
“How far?” asked inquisitive Peter.
“I don’t know,” answered the miller, “because nobody I’ve ever seen has been there.
“Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Princess who had five handsome elder sisters.”
“But I thought you were going to tell about the man!” cried Peter.
“If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear the grass grow,” said the miller, “and if you listen long enough, you’ll hear about the man.”
Once upon a time, as I said before, there was a Princess who had five elder sisters, the most beautiful ladies ever seen; and their father thought a deal of them, but not much of the youngest, who was small and not nearly so pretty. But she was very nice, all the same, and the thing she loved best was to go hunting after flowers. Nobody cared what she did or where she went, and she spent all her days wandering in woods and valleys looking for her plants. There was little she did not know about them, and if she had not been a Princess, with no need to work, she might have made her fortune by writing books about them and their histories. One day as she roamed about she came to a place she had never seen before—a little valley full of great trees, with a winding stream rushing through it like a silver thread. Beside the water grew a clump of the most lovely yellow irises.
She liked the spot so much that she returned to it every day; and she would sit for hours at a time beside the iris-bed, with her elbows on her knees, dreaming about wonderful foreign plants she had never seen and the strange descriptions of them she had read in books.