“Hazen, you are not wise, or really good, or loved, or beautiful. Why don’t you become so?”
“I,” Hazen thought back sadly, “I become these things? Impossible!” and he went on shovelling coal.
But still the Thought spoke to him, and said the same thing over and over so many times that at last he was obliged to listen and even to answer.
“What would I do to be like that?” he asked almost impatiently.
“First go up in the king’s library,” said the Thought.
So when the fires were roaring and the dampers were right, Hazen went softly up the stair and through the quiet lower rooms of the palace, for it was very early in the morning, and no one was stirring. Hazen had been so seldom above stairs that he did not even know where the library was and by mistake he opened successively the doors to the great banquet room, the state drawing rooms, a morning room, and even the king’s audience chamber before at last he chanced on the door of the library.
The king’s library was a room as wide as a lawn and as high as a tree, and it was filled with books, and the shelves were thrown out to make alcoves, so that the books were as thick as leaves on branches, and the whole room was pleasant, like something good to do. It was impossible for little Hazen, furnace boy though he was, to be in that great place of books without taking one down. So he took at random a big leather book with a picture on the cover, and he went toward a deep window-seat.
Nothing could have exceeded his surprise and terror when he perceived the window-seat to be occupied. And nothing could have exceeded his wonder and delight when he saw who occupied it. She was a little girl of barely his own age, and her lovely waving hair fell over her soft blue gown from which her little blue slippers were peeping. She, too, had a great book in her arms, and over the top of this she was looking straight at Hazen in extreme disapproval.
“Will you have the goodness,” she said—speaking very slowly and most freezing cold—“to ’splain what you are doing in my father’s library?”
At these words Hazen’s little knees should have shaken, for he understood that this was the Princess Vista herself. But instead, he was so possessed by the beauty and charm of the little princess that there was no room for fear. Though he had never in his life been taught to bow, yet the blood of his father the king, and of his father the king, and of his father the king, and so on, over and over, stirred in him and he bowed like the prince he was-but-didn’t-know-it.