young ruler on
the Lower Danube was officially announced. In November, 1869, they were
married, and on the 22d of the same month, Princess Elisabeth first trod
Roumanian soil and was received by thousands upon thousands of the
people, who sang to her the Roumanian hymn as welcome and greeting. With
Prince Carol she was supremely happy; he worshipped her and declared
that she was his better self. A little daughter was born to them, but
after a few short years of happy motherhood the Queen bowed in anguish
over a tiny grave, in which she felt that all her hopes were buried.

It was then, that she made the decision thenceforth to labor for the
good of the children of her adopted country, to unveil to them the
treasures of folk-lore that existed among the dwellers of the Carpathian
Mountains, and to do her part in educating them in patriotism by the
narration of simple stories of Roumanian peasant-life and
peasant-fidelity. The royal heart that had lost its own child, went out
and sought to make the children of a nation its own, and succeeded. Year
after year, from her beautiful castle in the Carpathians, where the wild
Pelesch in its calmer moods whispers to her its stories, the poet-queen
has devoted herself to writing for the benefit of her Roumanian
child-subjects, and with each year she has drawn the bond of sympathy
between her husband--who in 1881 had been proclaimed King of
Roumania--and his people closer and surer.

The Queen's best-known book, "_Aus Carmen Sylva's Koenigreich_" had its
origin in this wise: In the spring of 1882, the Roumanian Minister of
Public Instruction asked Her Majesty, if she would not deign to write a
book that could be used in the public schools of the kingdom as a
prize-book to be given to the best scholars at the close of the year's
work. To this request the Queen readily consented and the result was the
delightful stories and legends from the mountains and valleys around her
home in the Carpathians with illustrations by her own hand. They were
written in German and translated into Roumanian. From this book, the
present volume contains a selection of those tales, which, the Editor
thinks, may prove the most interesting to young English and American
readers.

The special charm of "Carmen Sylva's" stories is their sweet simplicity
of thought and language, their freedom from all conventional methods and
their homely beauty.--Supplemented by grammatical and explanatory Notes
and a comple