"Oh, very badly!" Said the princess. "I scarcely closed my eyes all night! I am sure I don’t know what was in the bed.

I laid on something so hard that my whole body is black and blue. It was dreadful!"

Now they perceived that she was a true princess, because she had felt the pea through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eiderdown quilts.

No one but a true princess could be so sensitive.

So the prince married her, for now he knew that at last he had gotten hold of a true princess.

The pea was put into the Royal Museum, where it is still to be seen, if no one has stolen it. (*)