There was once a King who was so fond of hunting that all the rabbits in his kingdom were born with their hearts in their mouths. The King would have been extremely surprised to hear this, for, of course, he never hunted anything so small as a rabbit; but rabbits are foolish enough for anything, as all the world knows, and it is certain that the rabbits of the King's forest would never have had a happy moment to this day, if the Green Enchantress had not suddenly taken it into her head to try and bewitch the King.

Now, the Green Enchantress was very beautiful indeed. She sat all day long at the foot of an old lime-tree in the royal forest, and she was dressed all in green, and she had small white hands and great black eyes and quantities and quantities of dark red hair. Every animal in the forest, from the largest wild boar down to the smallest baby-rabbit, was a friend of hers; and it made her dreadfully unhappy when she saw them being killed just to amuse the King. So it was no wonder that she made up her mind, at last, to try and bewitch him; and the first time she tried was on a fine summer evening, when the royal party was riding home from the hunt.

It had been an exceedingly dull hunt that day, for the King had found nothing whatever to kill, and this made him so exceedingly irritable that his followers took care to keep a good way behind him as they rode along. That was how it happened that the King was riding quite alone, when a voice suddenly called out to him from the side of the road.

"Good-evening, King!" said the voice. "Have you had good sport to-day?"

The King pulled up his horse and looked round; and when he saw a wonderful-looking girl all dressed in green, sitting at the foot of an old lime-tree, he did not know quite what to say. He knew very little about girls, for he had spent all his life in killing things, but he had a sort of idea that the girl in green was not much like the princesses who came to court.

"I have had no sport at all," he said at last. "All the animals were hiding to-day."

"No doubt they were," said the Green Enchantress. "So would you be, if people came hunting you with great horrid spears and things!"

She was really laughing at him, but the King had no idea of it. He only looked at her more solemnly than before.

"What do you know about it?" he asked her.

"Perhaps I know more about this forest than you know about the whole of your kingdom," answered the Green Enchantress; and this time she laughed outright. But the King did not mind in the least.

"Perhaps you do," he said simply. "I never pretended to know much. I do not even know why you are laughing. Will you tell me?"

"I am laughing because you know so little," she answered mysteriously, "and because there is so much I could tell you if it pleased me."

"I have no doubt you could," replied the King. "Will it please you to tell me now?"

"I don't feel inclined to tell you now," said the Green Enchantress.

"How strange!" exclaimed the King. "If I had anything to tell, I should tell it at once; but then, I am not a girl. When will you tell me?"

"Next time you come," laughed the girl in green.

"Next time?" said the King. "Why should I come twice when once would do?"

She did not trouble to answer that at all; and when the King looked again at the old lime-tree, the girl in green had completely disappeared.

"Is there a witch in the forest?" he asked, when his followers came riding up to him.

"There is the Green Enchantress, your Majesty," answered the chief huntsman. "I have never seen her, but they say she is the most beautiful woman in the whole world."

"Indeed!" said the King, in surprise; and he went home and spent the whole of the evening in trying to remember what the girl in green had looked like. He had quite forgotten, however; so the very next morning he stole out of the palace long before any one was awake, and walked as fast as he could in the direction of the old lime-tree. The wild boars and the other animals were most surprised to see him there so early in the day, and they followed him in twos and threes to see what he was going to do. As for the King, he strode on over the dewy grass and never noticed them at all. And all the while the bracken on either side of him was alive with trembling little rabbits, all squeaking to one another, with their hearts in their mouths,—

"We shall certainly be killed if the King sees us!"

At last he came to the old lime-tree at the side of the road; and there sat the wonderful girl all dressed in green, with her dark red hair falling round her down to the ground. The King would have taken off his crown to her, if he had not come out without it; but he made her a low bow instead, and the Green Enchantress began to laugh.

"Dear me!" she said, "why have you come back again?"

"They told me you were the most beautiful woman in the world, so I came to see if it was true," said the King.

"And now you are here, do you think it is true?" asked the girl in green.

"I suppose so," said the King, doubtfully; "but I don't know much about girls. If you were a wild boar, now, or——"

"But I'm not a wild boar!" cried the Green Enchantress; and she was so angry at being compared to a wild boar that she promptly threw a spell over the King and tried to turn him into a wild boar. But the King went on being a king, just the same as before, and he had no idea that he was expected to be a wild boar at that very moment.

"When are you going to tell me all the things you know?" he asked her, smiling.

"I have forgotten what there was to tell," said the Green Enchantress, sulkily; and she got up and walked away among the trees. The King wondered what he had done to offend her, and he tried hard to remember whether he had ever offended any of the princesses who came to court; but as none of the princesses who came to court ever thought of showing their feelings, he would not have known if he had.

Meanwhile the Green Enchantress was feeling very cross indeed. "What is the use of being an enchantress if people refuse to be enchanted?" she grumbled; and she ran off as fast as she could to find her godfather, the magician Smilax, for nothing ever put her into such a good temper as a visit to her godfather. Now, Smilax was the most amiable magician the world has ever contained, and he lived in an ordinary little cottage with a green door and a white doorstep and a red chimney-pot, and he did not look like a magician at all. All the same, Smilax was by no means a stupid magician, as the rest of the story will show.

"What is the matter?" he asked, when his godchild ran in at the door. "Do you want me to teach you a new spell?"

"No, indeed!" cried the Green Enchantress. "I am tired of spells; I want something much better."

"Well, well," said the kind old magician, "let us hear what it is all about, and then we'll see what we can do."

It was impossible to go on being cross when any one was as good-tempered as Smilax; so his godchild climbed at once on to the arm of his chair, and sat there with her little white feet dangling, while she told him all about the King who would not turn into a wild boar. "Is it not hard," pouted the Green Enchantress, "that I cannot bewitch the King?"

"Some kings are easier to bewitch than others," remarked the magician, wisely. "Now, what is it you want me to do for you?"

"I want you to make me into a princess," said his godchild, promptly. "Then I can go to court and dance with the King! Only think of it!" And she pretended that the poker was the King and danced round the room with it, to show how she should behave when she got to court.

"That's easily done," said Smilax. "You shall go to court and dance with the King, if you like; and I will make you so fine a princess that the King will not be able to distinguish you from all the other princesses in the palace!"

"But I don't want to be like all the other princesses, godfather; I want to be a real princess," objected the Green Enchantress.

Smilax shook his head. "Then I cannot help you," he said. "Nobody can make a real princess,—not even the Fairy Queen herself. Real princesses make themselves, and that is a very different matter."

"Shall I never go to court, then?" asked his godchild, with tears in her eyes.

"Of course you shall!" said Smilax. "Can you not go to court without being a princess? There is a back door to the palace as well as a front one, and any ordinary person can get in at the back door. But you must give up all your witchcraft the moment you set foot in the palace, for it is impossible to be an ordinary person and a bewitching one at the same moment."

"I don't mind that," said his godchild. "If I cannot bewitch the King I do not want to be an enchantress any more. I will go to the palace this very minute!"

And so she did, and that was how it came about that there was a new scullery-maid at the palace; and, one fine morning, the King met her all among the vegetables, as he took his stroll in the garden after breakfast. It is extremely probable that the King would not have noticed her at all if she had not happened to be wearing a bright green handkerchief tied over her dark red hair. He felt sure that he had seen that bright green and that dark red somewhere before, so he stopped and looked at her.

"What are you doing?" he asked her, with a smile.

"I am picking beans for the King's dinner," answered the little scullery-maid.

"How extremely kind of you!" exclaimed the King, who had always supposed that the beans for his dinner picked themselves. "Will you let me look at them?"

She held out her basket, and the King peeped inside and found it full of bright scarlet flowers.

"Are those beans?" asked the King in wonderment, and he thought he had never seen anything so charming before.

"I hope so," said the little scullery-maid with an anxious sigh, for she knew no more about it than the King and was dreadfully afraid of being scolded for picking the wrong thing. Indeed, she had hardly finished speaking when the angry voice of the chief cook called her from the back door; and away she scampered down the garden path.

Every one noticed how absent-minded the King was at dinner, that day. He talked even less than usual, and when the fifteenth course came round he turned reproachfully to the Prime Minister.

"I thought I was going to have beans for dinner," observed the King, in a disappointed tone.

"Your Majesty has just helped himself to beans," said the Prime Minister, when he had recovered from his surprise at the King's remark.

"What?" exclaimed the King, looking at his plate. "Are these the beautiful scarlet beans that grow in my kitchen-garden? Impossible!"

"They turn green when they are cooked, your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, who had never seen a bean growing in his life but could not possibly have owned such a thing before the court.

"Then let me have my beans before they are cooked, in future," said the King; and the Prime Minister hastily made a note of it on his clean cuff.

There was a magnificent ball at the palace that evening, and the King had ninety-nine delightful princesses to dance with, but none of them had dark red hair, and when he had finished dancing with the ninety-ninth he once more turned reproachfully to the Prime Minister.

"Where is the hundredth Princess?" he demanded impatiently.

The Prime Minister knew no more about the hundredth Princess than he had known about beans, and he wished he had gone to bed instead of coming to the court ball to be worried by the King's questions. He was too sleepy, however, to invent any more answers, so he had to tell the truth; and no doubt he would have made a much better Prime Minister if he had always been too sleepy to invent things that were not true, but that, of course, has nothing to do with the story.

"I have never heard of the hundredth Princess, your Majesty," he said wearily. "Would it please your Majesty to tell me what she is like?"

He fully expected the King to be exceedingly angry, and he wondered whether he should be beheaded at once or only imprisoned in one of the King's dungeons. It was therefore a great surprise to him when the King burst out laughing and was not in the least offended.

"I never heard of her myself until this morning," said the King. "She has wonderful dark red hair, and she is so sweet and so kind that she actually picks the vegetables for my dinner!"

The Prime Minister was so relieved at not being put into a dungeon that he positively yawned in the King's presence; and the King, for the first time in his life, noticed that he looked tired and sent him home to bed, which was certainly a much nicer place to send him to than a dungeon. And as for the Prime Minister, he went on speaking the truth to the end of his days.

The next morning, the King hastened into his garden the moment he had swallowed his breakfast. The chief huntsman met him just as he was leaving the palace, and asked him what time it would please him to start for the hunt.

"Hunt?" cried the King, impatiently. "What hunt? I am going to pick the vegetables for my dinner, and that is ever so much more important!" And he ran down the steps and across the lawn, as never a King ran before.

The little scullery-maid was wandering among the gooseberry bushes with a very disconsolate look on her face. "I am looking for sage to stuff the King's ducks with," she said, when the King came hurrying towards her; "but I don't know a bit what it is like, and how can I be expected to pick things when I don't know what to pick?"

"Do not look so distressed," said the King, for her eyes were full of tears. "I am the King, and I do not mind whether my ducks are stuffed or not."

"Ah, but the chief cook does," said the little scullery-maid, who, of course, had known all the while that he was the King. "The chief cook will beat me if I do not fill my basket with sage. Look! this is where he beat me yesterday for bringing the wrong beans."

She rolled up her sleeve and showed him a tiny black speck on her dainty white arm. To be sure, it was not much of a bruise, but when one has been an enchantress all one's life it is a little hard to be beaten for not knowing enough. The King was quite overcome with distress, and he stooped and kissed the little black mark tenderly; and that, as every one knows, is the only way to cure a bruise.

"Come with me," he said, "and I will help you to find some sage. Then the King's ducks will be stuffed, and the chief cook will not be able to beat you."

So the King and the scullery-maid wandered all over the kitchen-garden and hunted for sage. And the King knew just as much about it as the scullery-maid, and the scullery-maid knew as much as the King, and that was just exactly nothing at all; so there is no doubt that the King's ducks would never have got stuffed that day, if the pair of them had not suddenly stumbled upon a bush of rosemary.

"Does it not smell sweet?" exclaimed the little scullery-maid, and she picked a whole handful of it and gave it to the King.

"Surely," cried the King, "anything so charming as this must be the very thing we are looking for!"

The angry voice of the chief cook sounded once more from the back door, so they did not stop to think any more about it but filled the basket with rosemary as fast as they could; and then away scampered the little scullery-maid down the path, while the King stood and watched the little curls of dark red hair that fluttered in the breeze.

The chief cook was far too grand a person to stuff the King's ducks, so he left it to the little scullery-maid; and the result was that the King's ducks were stuffed with rosemary. There were only two people in the palace who enjoyed their dinner that day: one was the King, who sat at the head of the royal table and had three helpings of roast duck; and the other was the little scullery-maid, who sat on the back doorstep and ate the scrapings of all the plates out of a big brown bowl. As for the courtiers, they never forgot that dinner as long as they lived; but this was not surprising, for ducks that are stuffed with rosemary are surely ducks to be remembered.

After that, the courtiers had to eat a good many nasty things for dinner. Every day the chief cook sent the little scullery-maid into the garden to pick something for the King's dinner, and every day the King came and helped her to find it; and although they never found the right thing and although it was generally very nasty, the King always ate three helpings of it, and that was all that mattered to the chief cook. To be sure, it was a lot of trouble to take, just to please the chief cook, and it would have been far simpler to have cut off his head then and there; but neither the King nor the scullery-maid thought of that. After all, it was much nicer to go on meeting each other among the gooseberry bushes, and it certainly saved the expense of an execution.

Before long people began to wonder what had come over the King. He never went near the royal forest, and when he was not in the kitchen-garden he was in the library, looking for books that would tell him the difference between a banana and a turnip and the best place to find a cauliflower. The chief huntsman and all the other huntsmen had never been so dull in their lives; but the wild boars and all the other animals were as happy as the day was long. Even the rabbits began to pop up their heads above the bracken, and were quite amazed when they found that no one was waiting to kill them. "Truly," they squeaked to one another, "the Green Enchantress must have bewitched the King after all!" And perhaps they were not far wrong.

Now, the same thing cannot go on for ever; and one morning, when the King hastened out into the garden as usual, the scullery-maid saw at once that he had something important to say.

"There is to be a ball to-morrow," he told her. "The Prime Minister says so! And there will be ninety-nine princesses there besides yourself."

The little scullery-maid shook her head. "I shall not be there," she said. "I am only a scullery-maid; and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make me into a real princess."

"You are the hundredth Princess," declared the King; "and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make you into a scullery-maid."

"The ninety-nine other princesses have never picked the vegetables for the King's dinner," sighed the little scullery-maid.

"They would never do anything half so sweet nor so kind," said the King.

"The ninety-nine other princesses," continued the little scullery-maid, looking down at her crumpled print gown, "have never worn such an old frock as mine!"

"Nor have they ever looked half so beautiful or so charming," said the King.

The angry voice of the chief cook sounded loudly from the back door, and the little scullery-maid turned to run down the path as usual. But, this time, the King caught her by the hand and held her back.

"Will you come to the ball and dance with me?" he asked coaxingly.

She looked very sad. "I am not a real princess, you see," she sighed.

The angry voice of the chief cook sounded louder than before, and she pulled away her hand and escaped down the path.

"Will you come to the ball?" the King shouted after her.

"Perhaps!" laughed the little scullery-maid over her shoulder, and the next moment she was out of sight. It was truly a strange way of accepting an invitation to the King's ball; but then, she was the hundredth Princess, and perhaps that made all the difference.

It was a most magnificent ball; and the hundredth Princess did come to it. For, just as the King finished dancing with the last of the ninety-nine princesses, a great hubbub was heard in the hall outside; and into the room ran the little scullery-maid, and after her ran the chief cook with the soup-ladle in his hand, and after them both came the Prime Minister, and the chief huntsman, and the Lord High Executioner, and all the other people who were in the hall because they did not know how to dance.

"Who are you?" cried the ninety-nine princesses, as the little scullery-maid stood in front of them all, in her crumpled print gown, with her green handkerchief tied over her head.

"Who are you?" echoed all the courtiers and all the pages who happened to be there.

"She is nothing but a scullery-maid," cried the chief cook, brandishing his soup-ladle.

"She is the Green Enchantress," gasped the chief huntsman.

"You are all talking rubbish," said the Prime Minister, who had certainly lost some of his manners since he took to speaking the truth. "Any one can see she is the hundredth Princess!"

But it was the King who really settled the matter.

"She is the Queen, of course," he said gently, and came and took her by the hand. And no one thought of contradicting him, for, although real princesses have to make themselves, it is quite certain that any king can make a queen.

When the ninety-nine princesses saw how charming the little Queen was, they crowded round her with one accord and gave her ninety-nine kisses. So they were real princesses, after all! "Tell us," they begged her afterwards, "are you really the Green Enchantress?"

"Oh no," she said; "I gave up being an enchantress when I found I could not bewitch the King."

"Why did you want to bewitch me, dearest?" asked the King, in amazement.

"Because you were so fond of killing things," she said.

"Then I will never kill anything again as long as I live!" vowed the King.

And that is the end of the story, for when the little rabbits heard that the King had given up hunting, they all gave a great gulp and swallowed their hearts. And after that, there was no one in the kingdom who was not happy, for everybody's heart was in the right place.