ONCE upon a time there has been a prince who desired to marry a princess; but she might must be a real princess. He travelled all over the global to find one, but nowhere should he get what he desired. There have been princesses sufficient, however it turned into difficult to discover whether they had been real ones. There changed into continually some thing about them that was now not as it have to be. So he came home again and changed into sad, for he could have favored very much to have a actual princess.

One evening a terrible hurricane got here on; there has been thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking became heard at the town gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a princess standing obtainable in the front of the gate. But, accurate gracious! What a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and garments; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And but she stated that she changed into a real princess.

"Well, we'll soon find that out," notion the antique queen. But she said not anything, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea on the lowest; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on pinnacle of the mattresses.

On this the princess needed to lie all night. In the morning she changed into requested how she had slept.

"Oh, very badly!" stated she. "I actually have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven best is aware of what turned into within the mattress, but I changed into lying on some thing hard, so that I am black and blue throughout my frame. It's terrible!"

Now they knew that she become a actual princess due to the fact she had felt the pea proper through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.

Nobody but a real princess might be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a actual princess; and the pea turned into put in the museum, in which it may still be seen, if nobody has stolen it.

There, that is a genuine tale