CHAPTER VI.
_What Happened to Prince Prigio in Town_.
By this time the prince was very hungry.

The town was just three miles off; but he had such a royal appetite, that he did not like to waste it on bad cookery, and the people of the royal town were bad cooks.
"I wish I were in 'The Bear,' at Gluckstein," said he to himself; for he remembered that there was a very good cook there.

But, then, the town was twenty-one leagues away--sixty-three long miles! No sooner had the prince said this, and taken just three steps, than he found himself at the door of the "Bear Inn" at Gluckstein! "This is the most extraordinary dream," said he to himself; for he was far too clever, of course, to believe in seven-league boots.

Yet he had a pair on at that very moment, and it was they which had carried him in three strides from the palace to Gluckstein! The truth is, that the prince, in looking about the palace for clothes, had found his way into that very old lumber-room where the magical gifts of the fairies had been thrown by his clever mother, who did not believe in them.

But this, of course, the prince did not know.
Now you should be told that seven-league boots only take those prodigious steps when you say you _want_ to go a long distance.