The Prince and the Pea Farmer

Mr. Klosterman

Scoring : 526 Words, 36 Sents, 14.6 Word/Sent, 6.2 Kincaid, 6.2 iScore Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess, but she would have to be a real princess. He traveled around the whole kingdom looking for her, but everytime he met a princess there was always something amiss. There were plenty of princesses, but not one of them was quite to his taste.

One couldn’t ride a horse. Another ate with her fingers, and one was said to snore so loud bears ran in th other direction. Something was always the matter: they weren’t real princesses. So he returned home very sad and very sorry, for he had set his heart on marrying a real princess.

One evening a storm broke out over the kingdom. The lightning flashed, the thunder roared, and the rain came down in bucketsful. In the midst of this horrible storm, someone knocked on the city gate, and the prince, umbrella in hand, went down to open it.

“What are you doing out of the castle in such a rainstorm, Moron?” Prince

Poor angrily questioned the drenched man standing before him.

Moron the Wise was the wisest man in all of the country. Moron could preform feats that awed the kingdom’s commoners. He had even been known to do arithmetic without using his fingers, but there he stood water running down his robe in streams. “Oh, is that why I’m wet?” Moron answered looking puzzled. “I have come to give you advice. To find a princess, a real princess, you should put a single, green pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty down quilts. Then, invite each of the girls from the country to sleep over and whoever cannot sleep because of the pea is the princess you should marry.”

With these words, Moron waved his magic tuba, turned himself into a duck, and hopped away leaving Prince Poor to ponder his advice.

What Prince Poor didn’t know was that Moron’s brother-in-law, Ralph, was a pea farmer. In fact, he was the only pea farmer in the whole country. Since peas didn’t taste too good, Ralph wasn’t very successful. He hadn’t sold a pea since he traded this kid named Jack some peas for a cow, but that’s a whole other story.

Since Ralph couldn’t sell any of his peas, he was always over at Moron’s tower watching cable TV. Ralph especially liked American Idol and The Suite Life of

Zack and Cody. Moron hated his brother-in-law’s television choices and devised this plan to rid himself of Ralph.

Every night, after Prince Poor placed the pea under the quilts and mattresses,

Moron’s apprentice, Sam, would sneak into the bedchamber and eat the pea leaving no evidence. Since there would be no pea for the princesses to feel, Prince

Poor continued to buy peas from Ralph. Soon, Ralph became rich and ordered cable TV for himself. In the end, everyone, except Prince Poor, lived happily ever after. Moron rid himself of Ralph and could watch the Discovery Channel anytime. Ralph was rich and bought a big screen TV and a satellite dish. Even Sam, Moron’s apprentice, was happy. As it turned out, Sam liked peas.