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as the flicker of her skirt.
    The Ordinary Princess had vanished as completely as though she had been made of snow and had melted away in the sunshine.
    The King fined all his councillors half a month’s salary to relieve his feelings, and the Minister in Charge of Hiring a Suitable Dragon had to write and cancel his order for: Dragons, I. Laying-waste-the-land; for the use of.

PART III
    When You Are King

The Forest
    “I really shall have to do something about my clothes,” said the Ordinary Princess, speaking rather severely to Mr. Pemberthy and Peter Aurelious.
    Mr. Pemberthy and Peter Aurelious had not the least idea what she was saying, but they tried to look intelligent and sympathetic.
    Mr. Pemberthy was a little red squirrel and Peter Aurelious was a crow.
    The Ordinary Princess hardly ever had anyone to talk to, so she had made friends with the forest creatures and talked to them. It tended to make conversation rather one-sided, but that was sometimes an advantage. At least they could not answer back!
    The little red squirrel and the bright-eyed crow had become so tame that the Ordinary Princess gave them proper names (she had called the squirrel after a jolly, red-haired pastry cook at the palace, and the crow after her Uncle Aurelious), and now they followed her everywhere and came when she called them.
    It was a fine sunny morning on the far side of the forest from the kingdom of Phantasmorania, and the Ordinary Princess was gathering wild strawberries for lunch. Nearly two months had gone by since the night she had scrambled down the wisteria outside her window and run away into the forest, and every day had taken her farther and farther away from her home, until after weeks of wandering she had reached the other side of the great Forest of Faraway and the borders of the kingdom of Ambergeldar.
    The open-air life seemed to agree with her, for though she was thinner, she was as brown as a berry and her cheeks were as rosy as the little wild crabapples. But for all that, on this particular morning she was wearing a rather worried frown. The cause of the frown was the question of clothes.
    Up to now she had found life in the forest a very simple affair. There were plenty of roots and nuts and berries to eat and water from many little bubbling springs to drink. The forest pools made the most beautiful baths, and the deep emerald moss the most comfortable of beds, and there had not been so much as one rainy day since she left the palace.
    Morning after morning the sun had risen in a cloudless sky, and night after night the stars had been friendly candles to light her to bed. But now at last an extremely bothersome thing had cropped up.
    Her dress and her apron, once the property of Clorinda, were beginning to fall to pieces, and though nuts and berries may grow on trees, new clothes do not.
    Her stockings had been torn to ribbons long ago, and she had lost one shoe in a boggy bit of ground and the other in a stream. But that did not worry her at all, because she liked running barefoot.
    But her dress and apron and petticoat were quite another matter.
    Wandering in forests, and climbing trees or paddling in streams, are not good for dresses, however sensible their material. “It won’t be so long before they fall off in bits,” said the Ordinary Princess wor riedly.
    She had tried pinning the holes together with pine needles and bramble thorns, but it had not been a success: the pine needles broke and the thorns scratched her. Once she had tried to weave herself a skirt of grass and leaves, like people did in books, but that had been a failure from the start. It seemed a good idea all right, but it simply did not work.
    “Whatever am I going to do?” said the Ordinary Princess to Mr. Pemberthy and Peter Aurelious.
    But Mr. Pemberthy was busy eating an acorn, and Peter Aurelious only cocked his glossy black head to one side and said: “Qwa!” which might mean anything ... or nothing.

    “Neither of you are