"CHAPTER VIII.--TRY A DROP OF WATER.
"Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been falling in
love. But how a princess who had no gravity at all, could fall into
anything, is a difficulty--perhaps _the_ difficulty. As for her own
feelings on the subject, she did not even know that there was such a
bee-hive of honey and stings to be fallen into. And now I come to
mention another curious fact about her.
"The palace was built on the shore of the loveliest lake in the world;
and the princess loved this lake more than father or mother. The root
of this preference no doubt, although the princess did not recognize
it as such--was, that, the moment she got into it, she recovered the
natural right of which she had been so wickedly deprived--namely,
gravity. Whether this was owing to the fact that water had been
employed as the means of conveying the injury, I do not know. But it
is certain that she could swim and dive like the duck that her old
nurse said she was. The way that this alleviation of her misfortune
was discovered, was as follows. One summer evening, during the
carnival of the country, she had been taken upon the lake, by the king
and queen, in the royal barge. They were accompanied by many of the
courtiers in a fleet of little boats. In the middle of the lake she
wanted to get into the lord chancellor's barge, for his daughter, who
was a great favourite with her, was in it with her father. The old
king rarely condescended to make light of his misfortune; but on this
occasion he happened to be in a particularly good humour; and, as the
barges approached each other, he caught up the princess to throw her
into the chancellor's barge. He lost his balance, however, and,
dropping into the bottom of the barge, lost his hold of his daughter;
not however before imparting to her the downward tendency of his own
person, though in a somewhat different direction; for, as the king
fell into the boat, she fell into the water. With a burst of delighted
laughter, she disappeared in the lake. A cry of horror ascended from
the boats. They had never seen the princess go down before. Half the
men were under water in a moment; but they had all, one after another,
come up to the surface again for breath, when--tinkle, tinkle, babble
and gush! came the princess's laugh over the water from far
away. There she was, swimming like a swan. Nor would she come out for
king or queen, chancellor or daughter. But though she was obstinate,
she seemed more sedate than usual. Perhaps that was because a great
pleasure spoils laughing. After this, the passion of her life was to
get into the water, and she was always the better behaved and the more
beautiful the more she had of it. Summer and winter it was all the
same; only she could not stay quite so long in the water, when they
had to break the ice to let her in. Any day, from morning till
evening, she might be descried--a streak of white in the blue
water--lying as still as the shadow of a cloud, or shooting along like
a dolphin; disappearing, and coming up again far off, just where one
did not expect her. She would have been in the lake of a night too, if
she could have had her way; for the balcony of her window overhung a
deep pool in it; and through a shallow reedy passage she could have
swum out into the wide wet water, and no one would have been any the
wiser. Indeed when she happened to wake in the moonlight, she could
hardly resist the temptation. But there was the sad difficulty of
getting into it. She had as great a dread of the air as some children
have of the water. For the slightest gust of wind would blow her away;
and a gust might arise in the stillest moment. And if she gave herself
a push towards the water and just failed of reaching it, her situation
would be dreadfully awkward, irrespective of the wind; for at best
there she would have to remain, suspended in her nightgown, till she
was seen and angled for by somebody from the window.
"'Oh! if I had my gravity,' thought she contemplating the water, 'I
would flash off this balcony like a long white sea-bird, head-long
into the darling wetness. Heigh-ho!'
"This was the only consideration that made her wish to be like other
people.
"Another reason for being fond of the water was that in it alone she
enjoyed any freedom. For she could not walk out without a cortege,
consisting in part of a troop of light horse, for fear of the
liberties which the wind might take with her. And the king grew more
apprehensive with increasing years, till at last he would not allow
her to walk abroad without some twenty silken cords fastened to as
many parts of her dress, and held by twenty noble-men. Of course
horseback was out of the question. But she bade good-bye to all this
ceremony when she got into the water. So remarkable were its effects
upon her, especially in restoring her for the time to the ordinary
human gravity, that, strange to say, Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck agreed in
recommending the king to bury her alive for three years; in the hope
that, as the water did her so much good, the earth would do her yet
more. But the king had some vulgar prejudices against the experiment,
and would not give his consent. Foiled in this, they yet agreed in
another recommendation; which, seeing that the one imported his
opinions from China and the other from Thibet, was very remarkable
indeed. They said that, if water of external origin and application
could be so efficacious, water from a deeper source might work a
perfect cure; in short, that, if the poor afflicted princess could by
any means be made to cry, she might recover her lost gravity.
"But how was this to be brought about? Therein lay all the difficulty.
The philosophers were not wise enough for this. To make the princess
cry was as impossible as to make her weigh. They sent for a
professional beggar; commanded him to prepare his most touching oracle
of woe; helped him, out of the court charade-box, to whatever he
wanted for dressing up, and promised great rewards in the event of his
success. But it was all in vain. She listened to the mendicant
artist's story, and gazed at his marvellous make-up, till she could
contain herself no longer, and went into the most undignified
contortions for relief, shrieking, positively screeching with
laughter.
"When she had a little recovered herself, she ordered her attendants
to drive him away, and not give him a single copper; whereupon his
look of mortified discomfiture wrought her punishment and his revenge,
for it sent her into violent hysterics, from which she was with
difficulty recovered.
"But so anxious was the king that the suggestion should have a fair
trial, that he put himself in a rage one day, and, rushing up to her
room, gave her an awful whipping. But not a tear would flow. She
looked grave, and her laughing sounded uncommonly like screaming--that
was all. The good old tyrant, though he put on his best gold
spectacles to look, could not discover the smallest cloud in the
serene blue of her eyes.
