"Does it not smell sweet?" exclaimed the little scullery-maid, and she picked a whole handful of it and gave it to the King.
"Surely," cried the King, "anything so charming as this must be the very thing we are looking for!"
The angry voice of the chief cook sounded once more from the back door, so they did not stop to think any more about it but filled the basket with rosemary as fast as they could; and then away scampered the little scullery-maid down the path, while the King stood and watched the little curls of dark red hair that fluttered in the breeze.
The chief cook was far too grand a person to stuff the King's ducks, so he left it to the little scullery-maid; and the result was that the King's ducks were stuffed with rosemary. There were only two people in the palace who enjoyed their dinner that day: one was the King, who sat at the head of the royal table and had three helpings of roast duck; and the other was the little scullery-maid, who sat on the back doorstep and ate the scrapings of all the plates out of a big brown bowl. As for the courtiers, they never forgot that dinner as long as they lived; but this was not surprising, for ducks that are stuffed with rosemary are surely ducks to be remembered.
After that, the courtiers had to eat a good many nasty things for dinner. Every day the chief cook sent the little scullery-maid into the garden to pick something for the King's dinner, and every day the King came and helped her to find it; and although they never found the right thing and although it was generally very nasty, the King always ate three helpings of it, and that was all that mattered to the chief cook. To be sure, it was a lot of trouble to take, just to please the chief cook, and it would have been far simpler to have cut off his head then and there; but neither the King nor the scullery-maid thought of that. After all, it was much nicer to go on meeting each other among the gooseberry bushes, and it certainly saved the expense of an execution.
Before long people began to wonder what had come over the King. He never went near the royal forest, and when he was not in the kitchen-garden he was in the library, looking for books that would tell him the difference between a banana and a turnip and the best place to find a cauliflower. The chief huntsman and all the other huntsmen had never been so dull in their lives; but the wild boars and all the other animals were as happy as the day was long. Even the rabbits began to pop up their heads above the bracken, and were quite amazed when they found that no one was waiting to kill them. "Truly," they squeaked to one another, "the Green Enchantress must have bewitched the King after all!" And perhaps they were not far wrong.
Now, the same thing cannot go on for ever; and one morning, when the King hastened out into the garden as usual, the scullery-maid saw at once that he had something important to say.
"There is to be a ball to-morrow," he told her. "The Prime Minister says so! And there will be ninety-nine princesses there besides yourself."
The little scullery-maid shook her head. "I shall not be there," she said. "I am only a scullery-maid; and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make me into a real princess."
"You are the hundredth Princess," declared the King; "and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make you into a scullery-maid."