When I Was a Little Girl

by Zona Gale

“I will go out in the world and find this Human Being,” he cried, “and I will bring back the bracelet key.”

Without again seeing the princess, Prince Hesperus left the palace and fared forth on his quest. And when she found that he was gone, she was more wretched than ever before. For in her life no one had ever talked to her as he had talked, speaking his inmost fancies, and when she had lost him, she wanted more than ever to talk with him. But the king, who was a very wise fairy, did not tell her where the prince had gone.

And now the Princess Romancia did not know what to do with herself. The court was unbearable; all her trivial occupations bored her; and the whole world seemed to have been made different from all other worlds. Worst to endure was the presence of her companions, who all seemed to love and to understand one another, while she only was alone and out of their sympathy.

“Oh,” she cried, “if only I had a game or a task to do with somebody or something that didn’t know I am different—that wouldn’t know who I am!”

And she thought longingly of the prince’s fancy about the leaf-shadow for a pet which should dance with one all day long.

“A leaf-shadow would not know that I am not like everybody else!” the poor princess thought.

One night, when a fairy ring had been formed in an open grassy space among old oaks, the princess could bear it all no longer. When the music was at its merriest and a band of strolling goblin musicians were playing their maddest, she slipped away and returned to the palace by an unfrequented path and entered a long-disused part of the garden. And there, in a corner where she had never before walked, she came on a great place of rich, black earth, which, in the sweet Spring air, lay ready for the sowing. It was the spadeful of earth which the day labourer had brought to her christening; and there, for all these years, the king had caused it to remain untouched, its own rank weed growth enriching its richness, until but a touch would now turn it to fruitage. And seeing it so, and being filled with her wish for something which should take her thought away from herself and from her difference from all the world, the Princess Romancia was instantly minded to make a garden.

Night being the work time and play time of the fairies, the princess went at once to the palace granaries and selected seeds of many kinds, flower and vegetable and fern seeds, and she brought them to this corner of rich earth, and there she planted them, under the moon. She would call no servants to help her, fearing lest they would smile among themselves at her strange doing. All night she worked at the planting, and when morning came, she fell asleep in a mandrake blossom, and woke hungry for a breakfast of honeydew and thinking of nothing save getting back to her new gardening.

The Wind helped her, and as the days passed, the Sun and the Rain helped her, and she used certain magic which she knew, so that presently her garden was a glory. Poppies and corn, beans and berries, green peas and sweet peas, pinks and potatoes, celery and white phlox, melons and cardinal flowers—all these grew wonderfully together, as it were, hand in hand, as they will grow for fairy folk, and in such great luxuriance that the princess wrought early and late to keep them ordered and watered. She would have no servants to help her, for she grew more and more to love her task. For here at last in her garden she had found those whom she could not imagine to be smiling among themselves at anything that she said or did; but all the green things responded to her hands like friends answering to a hand clasp, and when the flowers nodded to one another, this meant only that a company of little leaf-shadows were set dancing on the earth, almost as if they had been tamed to be her pets, according to the prince’s fancy.

Up at the palace the queen and the ladies-in-waiting to the queen and the princess regarded all this as but another sign of poor Romancia’s strangeness. From her tower window the queen peered anxiously down at her daughter toiling away at sunrise.