ank who was a stranger
to her save for his name and his renown as the lord of a neighbouring
country; there was no help for her, since she was a princess, but she
must wed according to the claims of her station. When she heard of it,
she went at nightfall to her pansies, all lying in their beds, and told
them of her grief. They, awakened by her tears, lifted up their grave
eyes and looked at her.

"Do you not hear?" said they.

"Hear what?" asked the Princess.

"We are low in the ground: we hear!" said the pansies. "Stoop down your
head and listen!"

The Princess let her head go to the ground; and "click, click," she
heard wooden shoes coming along the road. She ran to the gate, and there
was Hands, tall and lean, dressed as a poor peasant, with a bundle tied
up in a blue cotton handkerchief across his shoulder, and five thousand
miles trodden to nothing by the faithful tramping of his old wooden
shoes.

"Oh, the blue moon, the blue moon!" cried the Princess; and running down
the road, she threw herself into his arms.

How happy and proud they were of each other! He, because she remembered
him and knew him so well by the sight of his face and the sound of his
feet after all these years; and she, because he had come all that way in
a pair of wooden shoes, just as he was, and had not been afraid that she
would be ashamed to know him again.

"I am so hungry!" said Hands, when he and Nillywill had done kissing
each other. And when Nillywill heard that, she brought him into the
palace through the pansies by her own private way; then with her own
hands she set food before him, and made him eat. Hands, looking at her,
said, "You are quite as beautiful as I thought you would be!"

"And you--so are you!" she answered, laughing and clapping her hands.
And "Oh, the blue moon," she cried--"surely the blue moon must rise
to-night!"

Low down in the west the new moon, leaning on its side, rocked and
turned softly in its sleep; and there, facing the earth through the
cleared night, the blue moon hung like a burning grape against the sky.
Like the heart of a sapphire laid open, the air flushed and purpled to
a deeper shade. The wind drew in its breath close and hushed, till not
a leaf quaked in the boughs; and the sea that lay out west gathered its
waves together softly to its heart, and let the heave of its tide fall
wholly to slumber. Round-eyed, the stars looked at themselves in the
charmed water, while in a luminous azu