Then he said to him, “If thou canst give me an answer to
three questions which I will ask thee, I will look on thee as my own
child, and thou shalt dwell with me in my royal palace.” The boy said,
“What are the three questions?” The King said, “The first is, how many
drops of water are there in the ocean?” The shepherd boy answered,
“Lord King, if you will have all the rivers on earth dammed up so that
not a single drop runs from them into the sea until I have counted it,
I will tell you how many drops there are in the sea.” The King said,
“The next question is, how many stars are there in the sky?” The
shepherd boy said, “Give me a great sheet of white paper,” and then he
made so many fine points on it with a pen that they could scarcely be
seen, and it was all but impossible to count them; any one who looked
at them would have lost his sight. Then he said, “There are as many
stars in the sky as there are points on the paper; just count them.”
But no one was able to do it. The King said, “The third question is,
how many seconds of time are there in eternity.” Then said the shepherd
boy, “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles
and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in
depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on
it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first
second of eternity will be over.”

The King said, “Thou hast answered the three questions like a wise man,
and shalt henceforth dwell with me in my royal palace, and I will
regard thee as my own child.”



153 The Star-Money

There was once on a time a little girl whose father and mother were
dead, and she was so poor that she no longer had any little room to
live in, or bed to sleep in, and at last she had nothing else but the
clothes she was wearing and a little bit of bread in her hand which
some charitable soul had given her. She was, however, good and pious. And as she was thus forsaken by all the world, she went forth into the
open country, trusting in the good God. Then a poor man met her, who
said, “Ah, give me something to eat, I am so hungry!” She reached him
the whole of her piece of bread, and said, “May God bless it to thy
use,” and went onwards. Then came a child who moaned and said, “My head
is so cold, give me something to cover it with.” So she took off her
hood and gave it to him; and when she had walked a little farther, she
met another child who had no jacket and was frozen with cold. Then she
gave it her own; and a little farther on one begged for a frock, and
she gave away that also. At length she got into a forest and it had
already become dark, and there came yet another child, and asked for a
little shirt, and the good little girl thought to herself, “It is a
dark night and no one sees thee, thou canst very well give thy little
shirt away,” and took it off, and gave away that also. And as she so
stood, and had not one single thing left, suddenly some stars from
heaven fell down, and they were nothing else but hard smooth pieces of
money, and although she had just given her little shirt away, she had a
new one which was of the very finest linen. Then she gathered together
the money into this, and was rich all the days of her life. 154 The Stolen Farthings

A father was one day sitting at dinner with his wife and his children,
and a good friend who had come on a visit was with them. And as they
thus sat, and it was striking twelve o’clock, the stranger saw the door
open, and a very pale child dressed in snow-white clothes came in. It
did not look around, and it did not speak; but went straight into the
next room. Soon afterwards it came back, and went out at the door again
in the same quiet manner. On the second and on the third day, it came
also exactly in the same way. At last the stranger asked the father to
whom the beautiful child that went into the next room every day at noon
belonged? “I have never seen it,” said he, neither did he know to whom
it could belong. The next day when it again came, the stranger pointed
it out to the father, who however did not see it, and the mother and
the children also all saw nothing. On this the stranger got up, went to
the room door, opened it a little, and peeped in. Then he saw the child
sitting on the ground, and digging and seeking about industriously
amongst the crevices between the boards of the floor, but when it saw
the stranger, it disappeared. He now told what he had seen and
described the child exactly, and the mother recognized it, and said,
“Ah, it is my dear child who died a month ago.” They took up the boards
and found two farthings which the child had once received from its
mother that it might give them to a poor man; it, however, had thought,
“Thou canst buy thyself a biscuit for that,” and had kept the
farthings, and hidden them in the openings between the boards; and
therefore it had had no rest in its grave, and had come every day at
noon to seek for these farthings. The parents gave the money at once to
a poor man, and after that the child was never seen again. 155 Brides On Their Trial

There was once a young shepherd who wished much to marry, and was
acquainted with three sisters who were all equally pretty, so that it
was difficult to him to make a choice, and he could not decide to give
the preference to any one of them. Then he asked his mother for advice,
and she said, “Invite all three, and set some cheese before them, and
watch how they eat it.” The youth did so; the first, however, swallowed
the cheese with the rind on; the second hastily cut the rind off the
cheese, but she cut it so quickly that she left much good cheese with
it, and threw that away also; the third peeled the rind off carefully,
and cut neither too much nor too little. The shepherd told all this to
his mother, who said, “Take the third for thy wife.” This he did, and
lived contentedly and happily with her. 156 Odds And Ends

There was once on a time a maiden who was pretty, but idle and
negligent. When she had to spin she was so out of temper that if there
was a little knot in the flax, she at once pulled out a whole heap of
it, and strewed it about on the ground beside her. Now she had a
servant who was industrious, and gathered together the bits of flax
which were thrown away, cleaned them, span them fine, and had a
beautiful gown made out of them for herself. A young man had wooed the
lazy girl, and the wedding was to take place. On the eve of the
wedding, the industrious one was dancing merrily about in her pretty
dress, and the bride said,—

“Ah, how that girl does jump about, dressed in my odds and ends.”

The bridegroom heard that, and asked the bride what she meant by it? Then she told him that the girl was wearing a dress make of the flax
which she had thrown away. When the bridegroom heard that, and saw how
idle she was, and how industrious the poor girl was, he gave her up and
went to the other, and chose her as his wife.