The Little Lame Prince | Page 7

to have it. So he tried to get it, and got it too, as people like him
very often do. Whether they enjoy it when they have it is another
question.
Therefore he went one day to the council chamber, determined on
making a speech, and informing the ministers and the country at large
that the young King was in failing health, and that it would be
advisable to send him for a time to the Beautiful Mountains. Whether
he really meant to do this, or whether it occurred to him afterward that
there would be an easier way of attaining his great desire, the crown of
Nomansland, is a point which I cannot decide.
But soon after, when he had obtained an order in council to send the
King away, which was done in great state, with a guard of honor
composed of two whole regiments of soldiers,--the nation learned,
without much surprise, that the poor little Prince--nobody ever called
him king now--had gone a much longer journey than to the Beautiful
Mountains.
He had fallen ill on the road and died within a few hours; at least so
declared the physician in attendance and the nurse who had been sent to
take care of him. They brought his coffin back in great state, and buried
it in the mausoleum with his parents.

So Prince Dolor was seen no more. The country went into deep
mourning for him, and then forgot him, and his uncle reigned in his
stead. That illustrious personage accepted his crown with great
decorum, and wore it with great dignity to the last. But whether he
enjoyed it or not there is no evidence to show.
CHAPTER III
And what of the little lame Prince, whom everybody seemed so easily
to have forgotten?
Not everybody. There were a few kind souls, mothers of families, who
had heard his sad story, and some servants about the palace, who had
been familiar with his sweet ways--these many a time sighed and said,
"Poor Prince Dolor!" Or, looking at the Beautiful Mountains, which
were visible all over Nomansland, though few people ever visited them,
"Well, perhaps his Royal Highness is better where he is than even
there."
They did not know--indeed, hardly anybody did know--that beyond the
mountains, between them and the sea, lay a tract of country, barren,
level, bare, except for short, stunted grass, and here and there a patch of
tiny flowers. Not a bush--not a tree not a resting place for bird or beast
was in that dreary plain. In summer the sunshine fell upon it hour after
hour with a blinding glare; in winter the winds and rains swept over it
unhindered, and the snow came down steadily, noiselessly, covering it
from end to end in one great white sheet, which lay for days and weeks
unmarked by a single footprint.
Not a pleasant place to live in--and nobody did live there, apparently.
The only sign that human creatures had ever been near the spot was one
large round tower which rose up in the center of the plain, and might be
seen all over it--if there had been anybody to see, which there never
was. Rose right up out of the ground, as if it had grown of itself, like a
mushroom. But it was not at all mushroom-like; on the contrary, it was
very solidly built. In form it resembled the Irish round towers, which
have puzzled people for so long, nobody being able to find out when,

or by whom, or for what purpose they were made; seemingly for no use
at all, like this tower. It was circular, of very firm brickwork, with
neither doors nor windows, until near the top, when you could perceive
some slits in the wall through which one might possibly creep in or
look out. Its height was nearly a hundred feet, and it had a battlemented
parapet showing sharp against the sky.
As the plain was quite desolate--almost like a desert, only without sand,
and led to nowhere except the still more desolate seacoast--nobody ever
crossed it. Whatever mystery there was about the tower, it and the sky
and the plain kept their secret to themselves.
It was a very great secret indeed,--a state secret,--which none but so
clever a man as the present King of Nomansland would ever have
thought of. How he carried it out, undiscovered, I cannot tell. People
said, long afterward, that it was by means of a gang of condemned
criminals, who were set to work, and executed immediately after they
had done, so that nobody knew anything, or in the least suspected the
real fact.
And what was the fact? Why, that this tower, which seemed a mere
mass of masonry, utterly forsaken and uninhabited, was not so at