"Ah, this is good! This is very good indeed! We shall have the most beautiful town in the world, blossoming with flowers, and the most beautiful maids in the world, blossoming with health and sweetness like the flowers they tend. It will be hard to tell which is the fairer, the maidens or the flowers. Hey! Is it not so, my son?"
Then he would chuckle and poke in the ribs the young man who rode beside him.
The Lord Mayor's son was very good to look upon; tall and fair, with curly golden locks and eyes as brown as the heart of a yellow daisy. When he drove through the town with the Lord Mayor, the maidens down on their knees in their garden-plots would pause a moment from their chase of a wriggling worm or a sluggish slug to look after the golden coach and sigh gently. Then they would turn back to their Bowers more eagerly than before. For there was the prize!
[Illustration: THE MAIDENS WOULD PAUSE TO LOOK AFTER THE GOLDEN COACH]
You see, the Lord Mayor's son was himself part of the prize to be won. The Lord Mayor had vowed that Cedric, his son, should marry the girl who could show by late summer the most beautiful garden in Kisington-by-the-Sea. Moreover, he promised to build a fine palace to overlook this prize garden, and there the young couple should live happy ever after, like any Prince and Princess. And this was why the maids worked so hard in the gardens of Kisington-by-the-Sea, and why the flowers blossomed there as no flowers ever blossomed before.
Now one day the Lord Mayor drove through the village in his golden coach and came out upon the downs near the seashore. And there, quite by itself, he found a little cottage which he had never before seen: a tiny cottage which had no sign of a garden anywhere about it,--only a few flowers growing in cracked pots on the window-sills, and on the bench just outside the door.
"What!" cried the Lord Mayor, stopping the coach. "What does this mean? There should be a garden here. I must look to the reason for this contempt of my offer." And he jumped down from the coach and rapped sharply upon the door.
Presently the door opened, and there stood a girl, all in rags, but so beautiful that the Lord Mayor's son, who was sitting languidly in the golden coach, shut his eyes as one does when a great light shines suddenly in one's face.