“I see that this will never do,” said her husband; “try and spin. Perhaps you will do that better.”
So she sat down and tried to spin, and her husband tried to teach her; but the threads cut her tender fingers till the blood ran.
“I am afraid you are good for nothing,” said the man. “What a bargain I have got. However, I will try and set up a trade in pots and pans, and you shall stand in the market and sell them.”
“Alas!” sighed she, “when I stand in the market, if any of my father’s court pass by and see me there, how they will laugh at me!”
But the beggar said she must work, if she did not wish to die of hunger. At first, the trade went very well, for many people, seeing such a beautiful woman, bought her wares and paid their money without thinking of taking away the goods. Then her husband bought a fresh lot of ware, and she sat down one day with it in the corner of the market; but a drunken soldier came by and rode his horse against her stall, and broke her goods into a thousand pieces. So she began to weep: “Ah, what will become of me?” said she. “What will my husband say?” So she ran home and told him all.
“How silly you were,” he said, “to put a china-stall in the corner of the market where everybody passes; but let us have no more crying. I see you are not fit for this sort of work; so I will go to the King’s palace and ask if they do not want a kitchen-maid.”
So the next day the Princess became a kitchen-maid, and helped the cook do all the dirtiest work.
She had not been there long before she heard that the eldest son of the King of that country was going to be married. She looked out of one of the windows and saw all the ladies and gentlemen of the court in fine array. Then she thought with a sore heart of her own sad fate. Her husband, it is true, had been in a way kind to her; but she realized now the pride and folly which had brought her so low.
All of a sudden, as she was going out to take some food to her husband in their humble cottage, the King’s son in golden clothes broke through the crowd; and when he saw a beautiful woman at the kitchen door, he took her by the hand and said that she should be his partner in the dance.
Then she trembled for fear, for when she looked up she saw that it was King Grisly-Beard himself who was making fun of her. However, he led her into the ballroom, and as he did so the cover of her basket came off, so that the fragments of food in it fell to the floor. Then everybody laughed and jeered at her, and she wished herself a thousand feet deep in the earth.