 Once
upon a time there was a prince who wanted to find a princess, but she would
have to be a real princess. So he traveled all around the world to find
one, but there was always something wrong. There were princesses enough,
but he could never be sure that they were real ones. There was always something
about them that was not quite right. So he came home again and was sad,
for he so much wanted to have a real princess.
One evening there
was a terrible storm. It thundered and lightninged! The rain poured down!
It was horrible! Then there was a knock at the city gate, and the old king
went out to open it.
A princess was
standing outside. But my goodness, how she looked from the rain and the
weather! Water ran down from her hair and her clothes. It ran into the
toes of her shoes and out at the heels. And yet she said that she was a
real princess.
"Well, we shall
soon find that out," thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went
into the bedroom, took off all the bedding and laid a pea on the bottom
of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and
then twenty featherbeds of eiderdown on top of the mattresses.
That was where
the princess was to sleep for the night. In the morning she was asked how
she had slept.
"Oh, horribly!"
she said. "I hardly closed my eyes all night. Goodness knows what there
was in the bed! I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue
all over my body. It is horrible!"
Now they could
see that she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea right through
the twenty mattresses and the twenty featherbeds. Nobody but a real princess
could be that sensitive.
So the prince
took her for his wife, because now he knew that he had a real princess.
And the pea was put in the art gallery where it can still be seen, unless
someone has taken it.
Now see, that
was a real story!
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