Now it chanced that a ploughboy at work in a field hard by the palace heard the king's song and caught the words and the air of it.
He was young and happy and as he followed his plough across the dewy field, and thought of the corn that would grow, by and by, in the furrows it made, and of his little black and white pig that would feed and grow fat on the corn, he sang:
"The hawthorn's white, the sun is bright,
And blue the cloudless sky;
And not a bird that sings in spring
Is happier than I, than I,
Is happier than I."
"A right merry song, Robin Ploughboy," called the goose-girl who tended the farmer's geese in the next field; and she leaned on the fence that divided the two, and sang with him, for she was as happy a lass as ever lived in the king's country.
The farmer's wife had given her a goose for her very own that day, and the goose had made a nest in the alder bushes. There was already one egg in it and soon there would be more. Then she would send them to market; and when they were sold she would buy a ribbon for her hair. It was no wonder that she felt like singing:
"The hawthorn's white, the sun is bright,
And blue the cloudless sky;
And not a bird that sings in spring
Is happier than I, than I,
Is happier than I."
SHE LEANED ON THE FENCE THAT DIVIDED THE TWO.
The chapman,[5] from whom she bought her ribbon in all good time, learned the king's song from her; and as he trudged along the king's highway with his pack upon his back he, too, sang it; for there is no better weather for peddling or singing, either, than that which comes in the spring.