to see, and he was a young king, and his heart was
happy, he made a song for himself and sang it loud and merrily:

"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."

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."

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.

[Footnote 5: A peddler.]

A soldier just home from the wars, and glad enough to be there, had
the song from the chapman; and in turn he taught it to a sailor who
took it to sea with him.

The sailor was going to the far countries, but if all went well with
his ship, and with him, he would be at home in time to see the
hawthorn bloom in his mother's yard another year and another spring.

[Illustration: SHE LEANED ON THE FENCE THAT DIVIDED THE TWO.]

He kept the song in his heart for a year and a day, and then, because
nothing had gone amiss and he was homeward bou