hree farmers stood still with
astonishment.

'What! you scoundrel!' they cried at last, 'we drowned you yesterday,
and to-day we find you again, as well as ever!'

'It does seem odd, doesn't it?' answered he. 'But perhaps you don't know
that beneath this world there lies another yet more beautiful and far,
far richer. Well, it was there that you sent me when you flung me into
the river, and though I felt a little strange at first, yet I soon began
to look about me, and to see what was happening. There I noticed that
close to the place where I had fallen, a sheep fair was being held, and
a bystander told me that every day horses or cattle were sold somewhere
in the town. If I had only had the luck to be thrown into the river on
the side of the horse fair I might have made my fortune! As it was, I
had to content myself with buying these sheep, which you can get for
nothing.'

'And do you know exactly the spot in the river which lies over the horse
fair?'

'As if I did not know it, when I have seen it with my own eyes.'

'Then if you do not want us to avenge our dead flocks and our murdered
wives, you will have to throw us into the river just over the place of
the horse fair.'

'Very well; only you must get three sacks and come with me to that rock
which juts into the river. I will throw you in from there, and you will
fall nearly on to the horses' backs.'

So he threw them in, and as they were never seen again, no one ever knew
into which fair they had fallen.

From 'Litterature Orale de L'Auvergne,' par Paul Sebillot.

The Brown Bear of Norway

There was once a king in Ireland, and he had three daughters, and very
nice princesses they were. And one day, when they and their father were
walking on the lawn, the king began to joke with them, and to ask them
whom they would like to be married to. 'I'll have the king of Ulster for
a husband,' says one; 'and I'll have the king of Munster,' says another;
'and,' says the youngest, 'I'll have no husband but the Brown Bear of
Norway.' For a nurse of hers used to be telling her of an enchanted
prince that she called by that name, and she fell in love with him, and
his name was the first name on her tongue, for the very night before she
was dreaming of him. Well, one laughed, and another laughed, and they
joked with the princess all the rest of the evening. But that very night
she woke up out of her sleep in a great hall that was lighted up with
a thousand lamps