This story is based on an old song, which Caldecott has adapted and illustrated with lively imagination. A lady sends her son out to search for a wife with a fortune. He comes upon a pretty milkmaid, but when she says she has no fortune, he says he won’t marry her. “Nobody asked you, sir!” she retorts, and she and her girlfriends hound him reproachfully, forcefully visualizing attitudes about equality among the people of England at the time.