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0每天五分钟听经典英文故事，读绘本，磨耳朵。一个关于真伪与敏感的经典童话，一颗小小的豌豆揭开真正的公主身份。
The prince had always wanted to find a real princess
It was not that he had never seen princesses beyond the castle walls the world was vast palace after palace crown after crown and many young ladies claimed to be of noble birth welcomed as princesses wherever they went
The prince traveled from place to place and saw splendid gowns sparkling jewels and grand halls filled with perfect manners Yet every time a small doubt lingered in his heart
Perhaps they were princesses and perhaps they were not
Something about them was hard to put into words something simply did not feel right What exactly was wrong he could not quite say What a real princess should look like it seemed as though everyone knew yet no one could offer any proof
And so the prince returned to his own castle
He was very sad What he wanted was not someone who merely looked like a princess but a real one Yet after traveling so far and meeting so many young ladies of distinguished families he had come home empty-handed
That night the weather suddenly turned terrible
The wind howled outside the castle walls and the rain poured down as if the sky were emptying whole buckets at once Thunder rolled across the rooftop and with every flash of lightning the windows and stone walls seemed to split open for an instant Everyone inside the castle stayed warm and dry while beyond the great gate the wind and rain still raged in the darkness
On just such a night someone knocked at the castle gate
The old king himself went to open it
Outside stood a young lady
She was drenched from head to toe Rainwater ran down her hair streaming from her cheeks to her neck and dripping from her clothes and shoes She stood there looking so bedraggled that she did not seem like anyone who could have come from any palace at all
But she spoke up and said that she was a princess
Those words sounded very strange amid the noise of the wind and rain How could a real princess arrive alone at a castle door on such a night How could a real princess be caught in the rain like this
The old king welcomed her inside Inside the castle there were lights a fire and warm dry rooms But the identity she claimed did not become believable just because she had been brought through the door
The old queen said nothing at all
She did not question her on the spot nor did she send anyone to verify her story She simply turned and walked into the bedchamber to prepare a bed for the young lady
The bed was going to look very soft indeed
But at the very bottom right on the bedboard the old queen first placed a tiny little pea
Just a single pea Round and hard it lay there quietly with almost no weight at all Once it was in place the old queen piled twenty mattresses on top of it
Layer upon layer
The mattresses rose higher and the pea was pressed beneath them all completely out of sight But the old queen was not finished yet She had twenty eiderdown quilts laid on top as well
The bed grew taller and taller coming to resemble a soft little mountain Anyone who saw it would think that a night spent there would be a wonderful sleep With such thick mattresses and such light fluffy eiderdown someone who had been battered by wind and rain all night would surely sink right in and sleep warmly until dawn
The young lady was shown to the very top of it all
The night deepened and the castle grew quiet The rain outside was still falling and the lights inside the rooms slowly went out one by one That tiny pea lay at the very bottom hidden beneath twenty mattresses and then twenty eiderdown quilts
No one could see it
But the next morning everyone asked the young lady how she had slept
Her answer made everyone stop in their tracks
She said she had barely slept at all
She said it felt as though there was something terribly hard in the bed She lay there tossing and turning unable to get comfortable no matter what she did The thing pressed into her and tormented her keeping her from resting all night long By morning she felt black and blue all over
Only then did the people in the castle understand
The young lady who had been soaked by the rain whose clothes had dripped with water who had stood so wretchedly at the gate she truly was a princess
For only a real princess could feel a tiny little pea at the very bottom through twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdown quilts
The prince had finally found the one he had been looking for
And he married her
The pea was not simply thrown away It was sent to a museum and preserved like a precious piece of evidence
Unless someone has taken it it may still be there to this day
