‘Had you asked for a bit of bread in the honest character of a beggar,’ pursued the father, ‘poor as I am, I would never have refused your weary, woebegone looks; but to attempt to deceive with such a falsehood is not to be tolerated;’ and he rose up, and drove the poor child away.
Protests were vain, for no one recognised her under her disguise.
Mournful and hopeless, she wandered away. On, on, on, she went, till at last she came to a palace in a great city, and in the stables were a number of grooms and their helpers rubbing down horses.
‘Wouldn’t there be a place for me among all these boys?’ asked the little chicory-gatherer, plaintively. ‘I, too, could learn to rub down a horse if you taught me.’
‘Well, you don’t look hardly strong enough to rub down a horse, my lad,’ answered the head-groom; ‘but you seem a civil-spoken sort of chap, so you may come in; I dare say we can find some sort of work for you.’
So she went into the stable-yard, and helped the grooms of the palace.
But every day the queen stood at a window of the palace where she could watch the fair stable-boy, and at last she sent and called the head-groom, and said to him, ‘What are you doing with that new boy in the stable-yard?’
The head-groom said, ‘Please your Majesty he came and begged for work, and we took him to help.’
Then the queen said, ‘He is not fit for that sort of work, send him to me.’
So the chicory-gatherer was sent up to the queen, and the queen gave her the post of master of the palace, and appointed a fine suite of apartments and a dress becoming the rank, and was never happy unless she had this new master of the palace with her.