Hello, it's me, Lily Afrog, who lives in a pond and loves to tell stories.

This story is a fairy tale out of a book, a friend sent me by Storyland Mail.

The book is more than 100 years old and it has a red cloth cover.

The cover has a picture of a beautiful young woman with a crown of flowers in her hair on it,

and she is talking to a tiny little man with a white beard.

It's a real book called A Real Queen's Fairy Tales.

It's by the queen of Romania more than 100 years ago.

The real queen of Romania had a real fairy tale life.

Before she was a queen, she was a princess in the Rhine Valley in Germany.

I've visited there before. I had to fly there by

whooping crane and then I took a train and sailed up river on a lily pad.

The Rhine Valley is full of fairy tale castles.

On rolling green hills, I will never forget how beautiful it is.

That's where the princess grew up in a castle and her nickname was The Wild Rose,

because she was always outside wandering in the forest with the roses and the bees and deer

and rabbits and squirrels and her two big st. Bernard dogs.

When she was inside her castle, she loved reading and writing and feeding the birds who flew

to her window cell. Even though she grew up in a castle with balls and gowns and fine,

precious things, she wrote that the most beautiful thing she has ever seen is a spider web hung

with dew in the sunrise. She wrote that the real diamonds and jewels are only found in nature

and there is no fairy tale ballroom chandelier that can hold a candle to a spider's web

full of dew drops sparkling in the sunshine. Her writing reminds me how lucky I am,

...