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Updated: June 16, 2025
And day after day she guarded the flock, telling her sorrows to the dog, how she missed the dear ones and the home of her childhood. "One day the reigning prince of this strange land passed by while hunting, and he saw the princess tending her geese. He made inquiries, and when he found that the beautiful goose-girl was a princess, he offered to marry her.
It was always the German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.
"Not when we are in our Sunday clothes." "Then it is vanity." Gretchen shook her head wisely. "Mine is worth only four coppers to-night," he said. The vintner laughed pleasantly. Gretchen looked into his eyes, and an echo found haven in her own. Carmichael thirstily drank his first tankard, thinking: "So this vintner is in love with our goose-girl? Confound my memory!
"That is not the story," she said, in a faint voice that even her struggling sauciness could not make steadier. "The true story is called 'The Legend of the Goose-Girl of Strudle Bad, and the enterprising Gosling. There was once a goose-girl of the plain who tried honestly to drive her geese to market, but one eccentric and willful gosling Mr. Hathaway! Stop please I beg you let me go!"
How should a goose-girl know that such a question was indelicate? Her highness did not blush; the color in her cheeks receded. She fondled the heart-shaped locket which she invariably wore round her throat. That this peasant girl should thus boldly put a question she herself had never dared to press! "You must not ask questions like that, Gretchen." "Pardon, Highness; I did not think."
And she told what we all know about the tree, about the old mansion, the pedlar and the goose-girl, who had met for the first time in this spot, and had afterwards become the founders of the noble family to which the young barons belonged. "They would not be ennobled, the good old folks!" she said.
He turned round to see what sort of folk they were, but he hadn't looked at them a second before he ran up to them and cried: "Oh, good-day, Osa goose-girl! Oh, good-day, little Mats!" For when the boy saw those children he forgot entirely where he was. Crows and burning cabin and talking animals had vanished from his memory.
Within a dozen feet of him, her arms folded across her breast, her eyes half shut in the luxury of the senses, stood the goose-girl. He smiled as he recalled the encounter of that afternoon. It was his habit to ride to the maneuvers every day, and several times he had noticed her, as well as any rider is able to notice a pedestrian.
She made a curtsy to which the duke replied with his most formal bow of state. The sparkle of amusement was in his eyes. "The little goose-girl!" he said half-audibly. "Yes, Highness." Gretchen's face was serious and her eyes were mournful. She carried an envelope in her hand tightly. "Come to me, Gretchen," said the princess. "What is it?"
There is a story attached to this tree." And now she told him all that we already know about the tree the old mansion, the pedlar and the goose-girl who had met there for the first time, and had become the ancestors of the noble family to which the young lady belonged.
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