I took my rough drafts of drawings out of my pocket. The little prince looked them over, and laughed as he said:

"Your baobabs— they look a little like cabbages.

"Oh!"

I had been so proud of my baobabs!

"Your fox— his ears look a little like horns; and they are too long.

And he laughed again.

"You are not fair, little prince," I said. I don't know how to draw anything except boa constrictors from the outside and boa constrictors from the inside.

"Oh, that will be all right," he said, children understand.

So then I made a pencil sketch of a muzzle. And as I gave it to him my heart was torn.

"You have plans that I do not know about," I said.

But he did not answer me. He said to me, instead:

"You know— my descent to the earth... Tomorrow will be its anniversary.

Then, after a silence, he went on:

"I came down very near here."

And he flushed.

And once again, without understanding why, I had a queer sense of sorrow. One question, however, occurred to me:

"Then it was not by chance that on the morning when I first met you— a week ago— you were strolling along like that, all alone, a thousand miles from any inhabited region? You were on your way back to the place where you landed?"

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