far
away across dangerous seas for cargoes of salt.

At first the man did not want to part with it, but the skipper both
begged and prayed, and at last he sold it and got many, many thousand
dollars for it.

As soon as the skipper had got the quern on his back he did not stop
long, for he was afraid the man would change his mind, and as for asking
how to use it, he had no time to do that; he made for his ship as
quickly as he could, and when he had got out to sea a bit he had the
quern brought up on deck.

"Grind salt, and that both quickly and well," said the skipper, and the
quern began to grind out salt so that it spurted to all sides.

When the skipper had got the ship filled he wanted to stop the quern,
but however much he tried and whatever he did the quern went on
grinding, and the mound of salt grew higher and higher, and at last the
ship sank.

There at the bottom of the sea stands the quern grinding till this very
day, and that is the reason why the sea is salt.

173

The next seven stories are from the best known
of all collections of folk tales, the _Kinder
und Hausmaerchen_ (1812-1815) of the brothers
Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm
(1786-1859). They worked together as scholarly
investigators in the field of philology. The
world is indebted to them for the creation of
the science of folklore. Other writers, such as
Perrault, had published collections of
folklore, but these two brothers were the first
to collect, classify, and publish folk tales in
a scientific way. With the trained judgment of
scholars they excluded from the stories all
details that seemed new or foreign, and put
them as nearly as possible into the form in
which they had been told by the folk. These
_Household Tales_ were first made accessible in
English in the translation of Edgar Taylor,
published in two volumes in 1823 and 1826, and
revised in 1837. There have been later
translations, notably the complete one by
Margaret Hunt in 1884, but the Taylor version
has been the main source of the popular
retellings for nearly a hundred years. It
included only about fifty of the two hundred
tales, and was illustrated by the famous artist
George Cruikshank. An edition including all the
Taylor tran