OW you must be told that the King of that country had a daughter _as lovely as the day,_ who had never laughed in all her life!
She was as sad and sorry as the mournful Bell that rings for a death, and so they called her the _Passing Belle_; it was a sort of joke.
* The French country people call the Passing Bell La Dolente, and this unhappy Princess they named La Belle Dolente. If any child cannot understand this, she may consult her nice French grammar, and her French and English dictionary, and turn it over in her mind till next Christmas.
Now, as she was an only child, the 'Passing Belle had been spoiled from her very cradle. Cakes, toys, diversions, such as playing at funerals, had been lavished on her, but she never, never smiled.
They tried her with Punch and Judy, they tried her with pantomimes, they took her to the play, but there never came a smile on the pale lips of the Passing Belle.
She would not have laughed for a King's ransom; nay, if you had ordered her off to instant execution, and laid her head on the block, you could not have wrung a smile from her!
The King, who had a strong sense of humour, was in despair. Finally he had a proclamation printed:--
Every one thought it was hopeless to get a laugh from the Passing Belle. Then the King, who was a very religious man, determined to take her to the shrine of Saint Calixtus. Of course, if the Saint could make her smile, she would become a nun, and perhaps, in the long run, would have been as solemn and _lugubrious_ as ever.
LL the Court came, and all the Court nearly died with laughing at the procession of the halt, and lame, and blind. 'Go it, ye cripples,' cried his Majesty, in convulsions of merriment! Some of the people were like X's, and some like Y's, and some like Z's, and plenty of K's and S's, all the cross letters were there, all the letters but straight upright I. Meanwhile the courtiers held their sides and screamed, and the tears came into their eyes; but the Princess yawned like a pretty little trout out of water! She did not see what there was to laugh at!
Besides, if she _had_ laughed, perhaps they would have made her marry a man with a hump upon his back, or two wooden legs and a glass eye.