I

Once upon a time there was an Emperor of China, named Lee Wong. He would have been a very good Emperor if he had not been spoiled by kindness.

If he cried when he was a baby, his nurse called all the nurses in the palace.

They called the attendants, and the attendants called the musicians. The musicians played, the attendants danced, and the nurses walked up and down wheeling the baby in his carriage until he stopped crying. Sometimes this happened many times in one day.

When Lee was a boy he had his own way in everything. If he played soldier he was always the general. If he went to fly kites, he had the ones that would fly the highest.

Sometimes he wished to fly his kites when the wind did not blow. Then the poor attendants had to blowdecoration195decoration with a huge bellows to make the kites sail up into the air.
Child holding up kite, man on ground holding bellows

If he wished it were summer in the winter-time, they filled his playroom with beautiful plants and brought canaries and nightingales to sing to him.

In the hot summer days, if he longed for winter, they brought evergreen trees to the playroom. They covered the branches with cotton sprinkled with diamond dust to look like snow. They broughtdecoration196decoration cakes of ice and made a skating rink and jingled sleigh bells all day long while he played.

When he was a young man it was still worse. If he said anything, like, “This is a sunny morning,” or “I think it will rain to-night,” every one cried, “How wise!” “How wonderfully wise!”

So you see the Emperor was spoiled, and this was very unfortunate.

In China, just as in other places, every one longs for spring to come.

One year the Emperor wanted the spring to come more than ever. He had had a dull winter in his city palace and he wanted to go to his country palace.

“Command my brother, the Sun, to shine to-morrow,” he said, to his attendants. “Command the spring to come, also. And be ready, all of you, to go to the country to-morrow.”

One of the attendants wrote the Emperor’s commands on the finest Chinese paper and then burned it in the garden. He thought in this way the commands might reach the sun.

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Perhaps they did; for the sun shone beautifully the next day, and the Emperor and his attendants went to the country palace.
II

The next morning the Emperor waked up very early. A little bird was singing in the garden. It was a lovely day.

The Emperor thought he would go out into the garden to hear the little bird sing.

He put on his silk dressing-gown, his silver shoes, and his gold crown. It was only six o’clock, so no one was awake in the palace.

When the Emperor went into the garden the bird flew into the forest and sang still more sweetly.

“How stupid I was,” thought the Emperor, “I ought to have commanded it to stay here. Now I must go into the woods to see it.”

So he opened the gate and went across the field.

At the edge of the woods a peasant was plowing.

“Good morning, peasant,” said the Emperor,decoration198decoration “That must be an Emperor bird singing in the forest, because it sings so sweetly.”

“No, my lord,” said the peasant, taking off his cap, “that is a blackbird.”

“You may call it so,” said the Emperor; “but it is an Emperor bird if I say so, because I am always right. It is as large as a swan, and its feathers are like shining gold.”

“No, my lord,” said the peasant, “it is small and black.”

Just then the blackbird lighted on a post in the fence and began to sing. It was easy to see that the peas............