Why the Chimes Rang (Yesterday's Classics) by Alden Raymond MacDonald

Author:Alden, Raymond MacDonald [Alden, Raymond MacDonald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9781599150628
Publisher: Yesterday's Classics
Published: 2010-11-14T15:38:17.562000+00:00

The Palace Made by Music

MANY hundreds of years ago there was a kingdom in a distant country, ruled by a good king who was known everywhere to be rich and powerful and great. But although the capital was a large and beautiful city, and the king was surrounded by nobles and princes almost as rich and powerful as he, there was one very strange thing noticed by every one who came into the kingdom: the king had no palace. He lived in a plain house near the edge of the city, not half as large or fine-looking as many of those belonging to his subjects. And he had lived there for a good many years.

Of course there was a reason why the kingdom had no palace. It had not always been so. Years before, in the reign of the present king's father, there had stood in the midst of the capital city perhaps the most beautiful palace in the world. It was a very old building,—so old that no one knew when it had been built; and it was so large that, although people often tried to count the number of rooms it contained, they always grew tired before they had finished. The walls were of white marble, with splendid columns on all four sides, and behind the columns, in spaces cut into the marble walls, were pictures in bright colors that people came from distant countries to see. No one knew who had built the palace, or painted the pictures on its walls; for it had been the treasure of the kings and people of the kingdom for a longer time than their history told anything about.

Then, when the present king was but a little child, the palace had been destroyed. On a festival day, when the royal family and the greater part of the citizens were marching in a procession outside the city, there had come a great earthquake. All over the kingdom the people heard the rumbling and felt the ground shaking around them, but they had no idea what a terrible thing had happened, until they came to the city. Then they found that the earth had opened and swallowed up the palace in one great crash. Not so much as a single block of the marble remained. The crumbled earth fell into the opening, covering the ruins out of sight, and leaving a great rough piece of ground like that in a desert, instead of the beautiful spot that had always been there in the center of the city.

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