'Look here, sir,' said she, 'I wish to goodness you would take your wretched son away and put him in a school for saints, since you think he is so good. As for me, he plagues my life out, and, if you keep him here with his ne'er-do-well ways, you'll come home some evening to find me gone.'
Instead of beating his wife for these words--as some men do when their wives so beseech them--the goodman put his hand on her shoulder and said, 'Nay, nay, my dear; the boy is only a boy; let him stay with us another year until he can fend for himself. Now, I'll tell you what: let the man who looks after the sheep come in here and do the work about the house, and Jack will take his place in the field. The man can have Jack's bed, and Jack will be delighted to sleep in the outhouse. What say you?'
The wife could not object to this, for, at least, the man would be more useful and less troublesome about the house than Jack could ever be. So she agreed to her husband's proposal.
The next day the plan was put into operation.
The man was set to work about the house, and Jack was sent out into the fields to mind the sheep. As he went he sang merrily, for he loved the green fields and the animals. He doubted the dinner his stepmother had put up for him, wrapped in a kitchen clout; yet he sang merrily as he went in search of the sheep:
_'Green gravel! Green gravel! Thy grass is so green. 'Tis the fairies' green gravel With the daisies between.'_
_'Snowy sheepie-woolsides, Save your wool for me; Then in snowy yuletides Snug and warm I'll be.'_
Then, later, when he began to get hungry, it was:
_'Sheepie, wander, wander All the fields about; Grass is growing under, Clover budding out. My mother does not squander Cakes on me, I doubt; What is here, I wonder, In this kitchen clout?'_
And, sitting down on a mossy bank, he opened the clout in which his stepmother had wrapped his dinner. Lo and behold, it was dry bread, with a very thick layer of dripping scraped off from it back into the pot. He ate very little, thinking that surely his father would give him something nicer to eat when he got home.
In the afternoon he sat on the hillside watching the sheep and singing merrily, when he saw an aged man with a staff making his way towards him.