ished,
the water dried up, and the girl almost died of thirst. When she came
to the pear tree it stood full of pears, but do you suppose the
traveler could taste even one of them? No! The tree had made itself a
thousand times as tall as before, so that its boughs touched the
clouds! So the old woman's daughter might pick her teeth, she obtained
nothing else. Going further on she met the dog, which again had a
collar of ducats round its neck; but when the girl tried to take it
off the dog bit her so that he tore off her fingers and would not let
her touch him. The girl, in rage and shame, sucked her delicate little
hands, but it did no good.

At last, after great difficulty, she reached her mother's house, but
even here she did not find herself rolling in money, for when the old
man's wife opened the chest, out came a host of dragons, which
swallowed her and her daughter as if they had never been in the world.
Then dragons, trunk, and all vanished.

The old man could now live in peace, and possessed countless riches;
his daughter he married to a worthy, capable man. The cocks now crowed
on the gate-posts, the threshold, and everywhere, but the hens no
longer crowed as an evil omen in the house of the old man, who had not
many days of life remaining. He was bald and bent, because his wife
had quarreled with him too often and looked to see if he didn't need a
drubbing.

The Poor Boy.

Once upon a time something happened. If it hadn't happened, it
wouldn't be told.

There was once a poor widow, so poor that even the flies would not
stay in her house, and this widow had two children, a boy and a girl.
The boy was such a brave fellow that he would have torn the snakes'
tongues out of their mouths, and the girl was so beautiful that the
emperor's sons and handsome princes of every land were waiting
impatiently for her to grow up, that they might go and court her. But
when the girl had reached her sixteenth year, the same thing befell
her that happens to all beautiful maidens--a dragon came, stole her,
and carried her far away to the shore of another country. From that
day the widow loved her son hundreds and thousands of times better
than before, because he was now her only child and the sole joy she
had in the world. She watched him like the apple of her eye and would
not let him go a single step away from her. But much as she loved him
she was cheerless and sad, for, dear me! a boy is only a boy, but a
girl i