"Ah me! What shall I do?" she cried. "I shall have no more earnings for another year, and by that time my lord may be wed to some fair maiden, and I will surely die of a broken heart!" She covered her face and wept aloud at her misfortune. Suddenly she began to laugh instead.
"Oh, that I should be so foolish!" she exclaimed. "Here waiting my hand I have a hundred pens." She seized the large blue gander and plucked a fine quill from under his wing, but no sooner had she done so than the bird began to speak.
"That is not right," declared the gander. "You have taken what belongs not to you but to me. Put back my quill, or I shall be vexed."
"And who is there to care?" replied the goose girl rudely. "When I have written a letter to my lord of the gray stone castle, you shall have your quill and not before."
She began to speak her thoughts aloud, as goose girls often do, and started once more to compose the letter. "To my dearest lord of the gray stone castle, whom I love with all my heart, but who whirls past me as I sit tending geese in the meadow," she planned to write, and dipped the quill in the purple ink. To her dismay the pen wrote not at all as she planned, but seemed possessed of a spirit to go of itself. It wrote with a remarkable flourish:
"Dear gander!"
But the goose girl pulled it from the paper before it could write more.
"What manner of pen is this?" she cried in vexation.
"It is not your quill," said the blue gander. "I am its master, and it will write letters to none but me."
"Well, upon my word!" declared the goose girl. "You are the most forward creature I have yet seen, and this is what you will get." She took a long branch and beat the gander until he hid from sight in the bushes. Then again she strove to write her letter, but again the pen was possessed of a spirit of mischief.