Parody of Fables About Authenticity

Question

I was just telling one of my sons about a humorous fantasy story that was in one of my middle school textbooks. It was just a couple pages at most, and I think it was written by a famous mid-twentieth-century American humorist—most likely Ogden Nash or James Thurber, but I can't seeming find mention of it in lists of either of their works, since they both published collections containing many individual works. However, assuming I am remembering correctly, and it was a famous author, it might not be too difficult to find (assuming nobody just remembers the answer off the top of their head).

The plot was a parody of a standard fantasy fable, in which a princess asks all her suitors to bring her gifts, and based on those gifts she will decide who she is going to marry. The apparent protagonist is a prince from a very poor country, which is infested with wizards, rats, and mining engineers (one of several humorous anachronisms in the story). He tries to give her a gift truly representative of his country—pieces of feldspar, I think. However, the princess instead decides to marry the suitor who bought her a platinum box.

Answer 1

You are correct in that it's James Thurber's "The Princess and the Tin Box".

Relevant quotes:

Now the fifth prince was the strongest and handsomest of all the five suitors, but he was the son of a poor king whose realm had been overrun by mice and locusts and wizards and mining engineers so that there was nothing much of value left in it. He came plodding up to the palace of the Princess on a plow horse, and he brought her a small tin box filled with mica and feldspar and hornblende (types of ordinary rocks) which he had picked up on the way.

The Princess smiled and walked up to the table and picked up the present she liked the most. It was the platinum-and-sapphire jewel box, the gift of the third prince.