felt very much more at home when he met a young fellow
named Hans who had come from the same village. He was not the Hans who
married Grettel, but the one whom Miss Muffet had often heard of because
he traded a horse for a cow, the cow for a pig, the pig for a goose, and
so on, all the way home. This caused a good deal of talk in the
neighborhood, and some of the villagers thought he wasn't much of a
business man.

Hans, however, was perfectly satisfied with himself, and was quite ready
to talk.

"The secret of being a trader," he said, "is to be quick about it. You
must not stop to think: that's where you lose time. If I had stopped to
think, I should have brought the horse home with me, and I might have
had it on my hands yet. There are ever so many people grumbling about
the care of their property; they say it is a burden to them. I tell them
that it's all their own fault. If they kept their eyes open, they would
find plenty of ways of getting rid of it."

Hans had such a shrewd twinkle in his eyes that Miss Muffet felt sure
that he would always get the best of a bargain, no matter how it turned
out.

While Hans was talking, she noticed a little man who looked like a
tailor.

"Didn't you start on a journey once," she asked, "with only a piece of
cheese and an old hen in your wallet?"

"Yes," he answered; "but that was a good while ago."

"I thought you must be the one. And you fooled the giant, and when he
squeezed a stone till water came out of it, you squeezed your cheese
till the whey ran out, and he thought your cheese was a stone, and that
you squeezed harder than he did. And he never saw through any of your
tricks, though I should have thought that even a giant would have
suspected. Are all giants so stupid?"

The tailor said that not all of them were so stupid, though fortunately
a great many were, and generally when they grew beyond a certain size,
something happened to their heads.

"If it weren't for that, Miss Muffet, there would be no room for us
common people on the earth. The giants would eat up everything. Now and
then there is a young giant like Thumbling who is active and keeps his
wits about him. But Thumbling was very little to begin with. Most giants
get foolish when they grow up, and then we can put an end to them."

When the talk got upon giants, it was astonishing to see what an eager
crowd gathered around the tailor. There were some knights in armor who
listened unconcernedly, fo