“Get out on to the window-sill,” said he, “and twist your hair three times round the great iron hook that is there.”
Then the Prince climbed up the rose bush with his naked sword in his teeth, and he took the Princess’s hair in his hand about a yard from her head and said—
The Princess jumped, and screamed, for there she was hanging from the hook by a yard and a half of her bright hair; the Prince tightened his grasp of the hair and drew his sword across it.
Then he let her down gently by her hair till her feet were on the grass, and jumped down after her.
They stayed talking in the garden till all the shadows had crept under their proper trees and the sun-dial said it was breakfast time.
Then they went in to breakfast, and all the Court crowded round to wonder and admire. For the Princess’s hair had not grown.
“How did you do it?” asked the King, shaking Florizel warmly by the hand.
“The simplest thing in the world,” said Florizel, modestly. “You have always cut the hair off the Princess. _I_ just cut the Princess off the hair.”
“Humph!” said the King, who had a logical mind. And during breakfast he more than once looked anxiously at his daughter. When they got up from breakfast the Princess rose with the rest, but she rose and rose and rose, till it seemed as though there would never be an end of it. The Princess was nine feet high.
“I feared as much,” said the King, sadly. “I wonder what will be the rate of progression. You see,” he said to poor Florizel, “when we cut the hair off _it_ grows—when we cut the Princess off _she_ grows. I wish you had happened to think of that!”
The Princess went on growing. By dinner-time she was so large that she had to have her dinner brought out into the garden because she was too large to get indoors. But she was too unhappy to be able to eat anything. And she cried so much that there was quite a pool in the garden, and several pages were nearly drowned. So she remembered her “Alice in Wonderland,” and stopped crying at once. But she did not stop growing. She grew bigger and bigger and bigger, till she had to go outside the palace gardens and sit on the common, and even that was too small to hold her comfortably, for every hour she grew twice as much as she had done the hour before. And nobody knew what to do, nor where the Princess was to sleep. Fortunately, her clothes had grown with her, or she would have been very cold indeed, and now she sat on the common in her green gown, embroidered with gold, looking like a great hill covered with gorse in flower.