. He turned it over with his pike-staff and saw that it was
full of beads and trinkets and ribbons.

"How came this here?" said he. And then, without waiting for the answer
which he did not expect, he flung it over his shoulder and marched away
with it.

X. How Hans Brought Terror to the Kitchen.

Hans found himself in a pretty pickle in the chimney, for the soot got
into his one eye and set it to watering, and into his nose and set him
to sneezing, and into his mouth and his ears and his hair. But still
he struggled on, up and up; "for every chimney has a top," said Hans
to himself "and I am sure to climb out somewhere or other." Suddenly he
came to a place where another chimney joined the one he was climbing,
and here he stopped to consider the matter at his leisure. "See now," he
muttered, "if I still go upward I may come out at the top of some tall
chimney-stack with no way of getting down outside. Now, below here
there must be a fire-place somewhere, for a chimney does not start from
nothing at all; yes, good! we will go down a while and see what we make
of that."

It was a crooked, zigzag road that he had to travel, and rough and hard
into the bargain. His one eye tingled and smarted, and his knees and
elbows were rubbed to the quick; nevertheless One-eyed Hans had been in
worse trouble than this in his life.

Down he went and down he went, further than he had climbed upward
before. "Sure, I must be near some place or other," he thought.

As though in instant answer to his thoughts, he heard the sudden sound
of a voice so close beneath him that he stopped short in his downward
climbing and stood as still as a mouse, with his heart in his mouth.
A few inches more and he would have been discovered;--what would have
happened then would have been no hard matter to foretell.

Hans braced his back against one side of the chimney, his feet against
the other and then, leaning forward, looked down between his knees. The
gray light of the coming evening glimmered in a wide stone fireplace
just below him. Within the fireplace two people were moving about upon
the broad hearth, a great, fat woman and a shock-headed boy. The woman
held a spit with two newly trussed fowls upon it, so that One-eyed Hans
knew that she must be the cook.

"Thou ugly toad," said the woman to the boy, "did I not bid thee make a
fire an hour ago? and now, here there is not so much as a spark to roast
the fowls withall, and they to be ba