"This made the king very unhappy, and again he thought and thought, till at last he hit upon a plan. He ordered a very large shallow bath of white marble to be made in the palace-garden. Then he poured into it all kinds of precious stones, and chips of sweet-smelling wood, besides a thousand cartloads of rose-leaves and a thousand cartloads of orange flowers. All these he ordered to be stirred up together with a great ivory spoon, till they made a kind of wonderful mud, and then he had the bath filled up with scented water. "'Now then,' he said to the queen, when he had brought her down to look at it, 'you may take off your shoes and stockings and paddle about in this mud as much as you like.' You may imagine that this was a very pleasant kind of mud to dabble in, and the queen and her ladies amused themselves with it immensely for some time. But nothing could keep this tiresome queen amused for long together, and in about a fortnight she had grown quite tired of her wonderful bath. It seemed as if the king's pains had been all thrown away. She grew cross and discontented again, and her ladies began to say to each other, 'What will she wish for next, I wonder? The king might as well try to drink up the sea as try to get her all she wants.' At last, one day, when she and her ladies were walking near the palace, they met a shepherdess driving a flock of sheep up into the hills. The shepherdess looked so pretty and bright in her red petticoat and tall yellow cap, that the queen stopped to speak to her. "'Where are you going, pretty maiden, with your woolly white sheep?' she asked. "'I am going up to the hills,' said the shepherdess. 'Now the sun has scorched up the fields down below we must take our sheep up to the cool hills, where the grass is still fresh and green. Good-day, good-day, the sheep are going so fast I cannot wait.' So on she tripped, singing and calling to her sheep, who came every now and then to rub their soft coats against her, as if they loved her. The queen looked after her, and her face began to pucker up. "'Why am I not a shepherdess?' she exclaimed, bursting into tears. 'I _hate_ being a queen! I never sang as merrily as that little maiden in all my life. I must and will be a shepherdess, and drive sheep up into the mountain, or I shall die!" "And all that night the foolish queen sat at her window crying, and when the morning came she had made herself look quite old and ugly. When the king came to see her he was dreadfully troubled, and begged her to tell him what was the matter now. "'I want to be a shepherdess, and drive sheep up into the mountains,' sobbed the queen. 'Why should the little shepherdess girls look always so happy and merry, while I am dying of dulness?' "The king thought it was very unkind of her to say she was dying of dulness when he had taken so much trouble to get her all she wanted; but he knew it was no good talking to her while she was in such a temper. So all he said was: