coming
home from a walk that evening, the King said, "Hullo, my dear! you have
had a new knocker put on the door. Why, it's rather like our porter in
the face! What has become of that boozy vagabond?" And the housemaid
came and scrubbed his nose with sand-paper; and once, when the Princess
Angelica's little sister was born, he was tied up in an old kid-glove;
and, another night, some LARKING young men tried to wrench him off, and
put him to the most excruciating agony with a turn screw. And then
the Queen had a fancy to have the color of the door altered; and the
painters dabbed him over the mouth and eyes, and nearly choked him, as
they painted him pea-green. I warrant he had leisure to repent of having
been rude to the Fairy Blackstick!

As for his wife, she did not miss him; and as he was always guzzling
beer at the public-house, and notoriously quarrelling with his wife, and
in debt to the tradesmen, it was supposed he had run away from all these
evils, and emigrated to Australia or America. And when the Prince and
Princess chose to become King and Queen, they left their old house, and
nobody thought of the porter any more.

V. HOW PRINCESS ANGELICA TOOK A LITTLE MAID.

One day, when the Princess Angelica was quite a little girl, she
was walking in the garden of the palace, with Mrs. Gruffanuff, the
governess, holding a parasol over her head, to keep her sweet complexion
from the freckles, and Angelica was carrying a bun, to feed the swans
and ducks in the royal pond.

They had not reached the duck-pond, when there came toddling up to them
such a funny little girl! She had a great quantity of hair blowing about
her chubby little cheeks, and looked as if she had not been washed or
combed for ever so long. She wore a ragged bit of a cloak, and had only
one shoe on.

"You little wretch, who let you in here?" asked Mrs. Gruffanuff.

"Div me dat bun," said the little girl, "me vely hungy."

"Hungry! what is that?" asked Princess Angelica, and gave the child the
bun.

"Oh, Princess!" says Mrs. Gruffanuff, "how good, how kind, how truly
angelical you are! See, Your Majesties," she said to the King and Queen,
who now came up, along with their nephew, Prince Giglio, "how kind the
Princess is! She met this little dirty wretch in the garden--I can't
tell how she came in here, or why the guards did not shoot her dead at
the gate!--and the dear darling of a Princess has given her the whole of
her bun!"

"I did