not
knowing of any corpse having been carried in, he was frightened
and ran to tell the padre. The padre, when he had seen the body,
said it was a miracle, and that it must be buried within the church,
for the sanctification of the edifice.

But Pedro, now thoroughly frightened, jumped off the bier and ran away,
and the priest and the sacristan ran the other way, so the poor man
never received the reward for his piety, and the church was deprived
of a new patron saint.

CHAPTER 6

The Adventures of Juan.

Juan was lazy, Juan was a fool, and his mother never tired of scolding
him and emphasizing her words by a beating. When Juan went to school
he made more noise at his study than anybody else, but his reading
was only gibberish.

His mother sent him to town to buy meat to eat with the boiled rice,
and he bought a live crab which he set down in the road and told to
go to his mother and be cooked for dinner. The crab promised, but as
soon as Juan's back was turned ran in the other direction.

Juan went home after a while and asked for the crab, but there was
none, and they ate their rice without ulam. [12] His mother then
went herself and left Juan to care for the baby. The baby cried and
Juan examined it to find the cause, and found the soft spot on its
head. "Aha! It has a boil. No wonder it cries!" And he stuck a knife
into the soft spot, and the baby stopped crying. When his mother came
back, Juan told her about the boil and that the baby was now asleep,
but the mother said it was dead, and she beat Juan again.

Then she told Juan that if he could do nothing else he could at least
cut firewood, so she gave him a bolo and sent him to the woods.

He found what looked to him like a good tree and prepared to cut it,
but the tree was a magic tree and said to Juan, "Do not cut me and I
will give you a goat that shakes silver money from its whiskers." Juan
agreed, and the bark of the tree opened and the goat came out, and
when Juan told him to shake his whiskers, money dropped out. Juan was
very glad, for at last he had something he would not be beaten for. On
his way home he met a friend, and told him of his good fortune. The
man made him dead drunk and substituted another goat which had not
the ability to shake money from its whiskers, and when the new goat
was tried at home poor Juan was beaten and scolded.

Back he went to the tree, which he threatened to cut down for lying
to him, but the tree said, "No,