But, unluckily, this beautiful wife had one great fault.

She was always wishing for the most unreasonable and impossible things, and though the king was always trying to get her what she wanted she was never satisfied, and every day she seemed to grow more and more discontented and exacting.

At last, one day in the winter, a most extraordinary thing happened.

A shower of snow fell in Cordova, which was the name of the town where the king and queen lived, and it whitened the hills all around the town, so that they looked as if somebody had been dusting white sugar over them.

Now snow was hardly ever seen in Cordova, and the people in the town wondered at it, and talked about it a great deal.