behind them.
It was in vain the lad chased after them and shouted and sweated; he
could not keep them together. In the end he had scarcely threescore of
them to drive back to the palace in the evening.

And the King was waiting for him with a cudgel in his hands, and if
the lad did not get a good drubbing that day, then nobody ever did.
When the King finished with him he was black and blue from his head to
his heels, and that is all he got for trying to win a Princess for a
wife.

Now after the second son had come home again with his doleful tale,
Boots sat and thought and thought about what had happened. After a
while, however, he rose up and shook the ashes from his clothes and
said that now it was his turn to have a try at winning the Princess
for his wife.

When the elder brothers heard that they scoffed and hooted. Boots was
no better than a numskull anyway, and how could he hope to succeed
where they had failed.

Well, all that might be true or it might not, but at any rate he was
for having a try at this business, so off he set, just as the other
two had before him.

After a while he came to the log where his brothers had seen the hag
with her nose caught in the crack, and there she was still, for no one
had come by in the meantime to set her free. He stood and stared and
stared, for it was a curious sight.

"Oh, you gawk! Why do you stand there staring?" cried the old hag.
"Here I have been for twice a hundred years, and no Christian soul
will take the trouble to set me free. Drive a wedge into the crack so
that I may get my nose out."

"That I will and gladly, good mother," said the youth. "Two hundred
years is a long time for one to have one's nose pinched in a crack."

Quickly he found a wedge and drove it into the crack with a stone, and
then the old hag pulled her nose out.

"Now you have done me a good turn, and I have it in mind to do the
same for you," she said. With that she took a pretty little pipe out
of the pocket of her skirt. "Do you take this," she said, "and it will
come in handy if you're on your way to the King's palace. If you blow
on the right end of the whistle the things around you will be blown
every which way as if a strong wind had struck them, and if you blow
on the wrong end of it they will be gathered together again. And those
are not the only tricks the pipe has, for if any one takes it from
you, you have only to wish for it, and you can wish it back into your
fingers a