Story of the Month

The King of Siam had two daughters whose names were Night and Day. Then he came to have two more besides, so he changed the names of the first two and gave the four the names of the seasons. But Divine Providence saw fit to present him with three others, so he was obliged once again to change their names to the seven days of the week... Then, after the eighth was born to him, followed by the ninth, he fell into a perplexity from which nothing rescued him but the months of the year, when they occurred to him; and so the little princesses were called thus: January, February.... and on to September — in the Siamese language, of course. And the King had resolved, after much hesitation and deep sorrow ("for he loved the Queen"), to cut off Her Majesty's head should the series exceed twelve girls. And that, of course, was not some-thing that would please Her Majesty!... But the Almighty willed the continuance of her happiness and well-being, and Princess September was the last of her kind... for after her the Queen gave birth to a series of boys — itself no short one either — who were given names from the letters of the alphabet, where there is room to spare, so that Her Majesty need feel no anxiety.

As for Their Highnesses the princesses, their characters were affected and their tem-pers colored by the successive changes in their names, above all the elder ones among them, who were exposed to the most changing and coloring — all except September, who was known as September: of

a nature gentle, bewitching, and winning ("except when her sisters heaped every kind of epithet upon her, out of jealousy and spite!").

One day came the birthday of the King, their father.. It was among His Majesty's customs on this occasion to bestow gifts and distribute presents to his people, instead of having them presented to him ("contrary to the traditions we follow among ourselves"). The strange thing is that the King of Siam admired this custom, and often wished he had been born many times over, so as to have more than one birthday — but so nature has decreed, and there is no way to attain the wish!!

On this very day the King found himself without valuable things for the giving of gifts, after all the royal titles had run out on him, and most of his wedding presents, and the gifts the country's rich men had offered him when the reins of rule were handed to him... His palace was empty even of his crowns, which had fallen away from the taste of that age...! This being the case, he was obliged to present each of his nine princesses with a beautiful green parrot in a cage of pure gold. And these creatures became the objects of the princesses' love and pride, and they took to teaching them speech an hour each day ("for, like His Majesty their father, they follow special, fixed regimens in their way of living..."), until at last,

with much effort, every parrot could repeat this sentence, "God save the King," in Siamese — and that is very difficult — and in seven other Eastern languages.

And one morning the youngest princess, September, went to greet her parrot as usual, and behold — she found it lying on the floor of the golden cage, dead!!

There is no need to describe the sorrow that cut into her heart or the flood of sincere tears that poured forth... Nothing distracted or consoled her for the loss of her beloved bird.. no.. nor all that the ten maids of honor attempted by way of cheering and comforting her.. At their wits' end and baffled by her case, they went and told her mother the Queen.. But Her Majesty judged that her daughter had sunk into absurdity, and sentenced her to imprisonment in her room, and denied her her supper... and so it was decreed for her that night!

And while she was weeping hotly for her bird from time to time, her heart weighed down with grief and hunger gnawing at her insides, behold — a little bird alighted in her room...! She stopped crying, took her little finger — which she had been sucking — out of her mouth, and listened attentively:.. the bird had begun to sing!! He was singing to her of the splendor of the lake in the King's garden — in a sweet, lovely melody — and