So that altogether the King was a great success from every point of view, as he was very long-lived, the last news that has reached here from the Narrowlands, reported that his Majesty was still hanging head downwards from the great crown, and was still setting the fashion throughout the kingdom, though the news does not tell us that his people have yet resorted to hanging from the chandeliers by their toes.
But the Narrowlands is very far away from here, so that news does not often reach us from it; there is even no talk of opening the country up, which alone shows how difficult it must be to reach.
* * * * *
In the mean while the Queen had come to the other shore. She flew straight to the little cottage in the valley, and the cock who was standing on the doorsill greeted her with a lusty crow, being glad to see her again.
In the house there was no one to be found.
"The little mother must have gone to her bleaching," the Queen said to herself, "and he—oh, he told me he was going to work in the wood to-day, so now I'll see about making the infusion. The kettle's on the boil, and it won't take long."
She took off the faded wind-flower crown, and looked at it for a moment.
"You poor thing!" she said, "it seems a shame, but still it can't be helped," and in a moment she had dropped it into the boiling water, which rapidly assumed the golden straw colour of a weak cup of tea. This she poured into a drinking-horn, and then set off with it into the wood at the back of the house. It was rather a ticklish task, walking through the low, dusky wood with the horn in her hand, for it was getting on in the day and the light was bad, and the small trees of which the wood was composed were difficult to walk among.
By her side the stream rushed and rustled over its rocky bottom, and her feet crackled too on the flooring of last year's fallen leaves, but the sound that she paused every now and then to listen for she could not hear. There came no sharp ringing of the axe down the valley among the trees.
"He must be binding the faggots together," she said to herself, and went on until she came to the clearing where he should have been at work; but there he was not.