dly. The world
is full of people who are always doing things; the only mistake they
make is in generally doing them wrong. But I am here to persuade them
to do the right things for a change, so that you may have your chance
of happiness as well as they."

"Oh, we shall never be happy," the people said. "If that is all you
have to say, you had better leave us to our unhappiness and go up to
the King's palace. For the little Princess has been blind from her
birth, and her great delight is to listen to poetry, so the palace is
full of poets. But none of them ever come down here, so we do not know
what they are like."

The Poet was overjoyed at hearing that at last he was in a country
where he was wanted; and he set off for the palace immediately.

"Who are you, and what do you want?" demanded the royal sentinels, when
he presented himself at the palace gates.

"I am a Poet," he replied. "And I have come to see the Princess,
because she is fond of poets."

"We have never seen a poet like you," said the sentinels, doubtfully.
"All the poets in the palace have smooth, smiling faces, and fine
clothes, and white hands. Her Royal Highness is not accustomed to
receiving any one so untidy as yourself."

The Poet looked down at his weather-beaten clothes and his toil-worn
hands; and he stared at the reflection of his wrinkled, furrowed face
in the moat that surrounded the palace; and he sighed in a disappointed
manner.

"I am a Poet," he repeated. "How can a man be a poet if his face is
smooth and his hands are white? No man can be a poet if he has not
toiled and suffered and wandered over the earth, for the sake of the
people who are in it."

Just then he heard a woman's voice speaking from the other side of the
gates; and looking through them, he saw a beautiful, pale Princess,
standing there all by herself, with a look of interest on her face.

"It is the little blind Princess," thought the Poet, and he bowed
straight to the ground though he knew quite well that she could not see
him. The sentinels saluted, too, for they were so accustomed to
saluting people who never saw them at all that the blindness of the
little Princess made no difference to them.

"Tell me," said the Princess, eagerly, "the name of the man with the
wonderful voice, who is saying all those beautiful, true things."

"Please your Highness," said the sentinels, "he _says_ he is a Poet."

"Ah," cried the little Princess, joyfully, "at l