A snappy, silly rhyme about a princess's lost shoe and a fiddler struck dumb by the whole business. The nonsense sounds, 'Doodle doodle doo', make it a joy to say aloud.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Doodle doodle doo,
The Princess lost her shoe:
Her Highness hopped,—
The fiddler stopped,
Not knowing what to do.
About this rhyme
Text matches: princess loses her shoe, hops, fiddler stops, not knowing what to do. · 'Mid-dance' is a reasonable, non-contradicted reading of a fiddler playing while someone hops, not an invented fact.
A princess loses a shoe mid-dance, hops on one foot, and the fiddler simply gives up, not knowing what to do next. The whole thing turns on that stalled music: everyone stuck, nobody quite sure how the dance ends. Try stamping to 'doodle doodle doo' and freezing on 'stopped.'
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition