One year when the fair was being held, the potter was at his place as usual with his stall covered with pots, and there came and placed herself beside him at the next stall a woman with some spinning-wheels. Her stall was covered with fine linen cloths woven in pretty patterns, and so fine and well wrought were they, that many people wanted to buy them. With her were her two daughters, and one sat at the spinning-wheel and spun the flax, and the other had a hand-loom and wove it when it was spun to show the good folk how the cloths were made. Both were pretty girls, but the girl who had the hand-loom had the sweetest face the potter had ever seen. Her eyes were very blue, and her hair was like golden corn, and when she smiled, it was as if the sun shone. The potter watched her as she sat weaving, and could not keep his eyes from her or attend properly to his own pots, or to the people who wanted to buy them. Every day he watched the young girl at her work, for the fair lasted for a week, and the more he looked at her the more he wanted to look, till at last he said to himself that somehow or other he must get her for his wife; so when the fair was done he begged her to marry him, and to remain with him, and he said he would always work for her, and she should want for nothing. The mother was a poor widow, and she and her daughters made their bread by going about the country spinning and weaving, and she would have been quite willing that the potter should marry her daughter, but the girl only laughed, and said that she scarcely knew the potter, but when she came back again the next year to the fair, she would give him his answer. So the widow and her two daughters went away, and no sign of them was left with the potter, save a lock of golden hair, which he had begged from the daughter. The year passed away, but to the potter it seemed the longest year he had ever lived. He pined for the time to come when the fair should be held, and the widow and her daughters should return. As the time drew near he got down the brown cup, and looked at it again and again. “Nay,” he said, “what harm could it do? the gipsy said it would give me my true love’s heart if she drank out of it after I had drunk, and I have drunk out of it many a time. I don’t believe it, but all the same it would be no harm for her to drink from it.”