Page:Household stories from the collection of the Bros Grimm (L & W Crane).djvu/120



The STRAW, The COAL, and the BEAN

HERE lived in a certain village a poor old woman who had collected a mess of beans, and was going to cook them. So she made a fire on her hearth, and, in order to make it burn better, she put in a handful of straw. When the beans began to bubble in the pot, one of them fell out and lay, never noticed, near a straw which was already there; soon a red-hot coal jumped out of the fire and joined the pair. The straw began first, and said,

"Dear friends, how do you come here?" The coal answered,

"I jumped out of the fire by great good luck, or I should certainly have met with my death. I should have been burned to ashes." The bean said,

"I too have come out of it with a whole skin, but if the old woman had kept me in the pot I should have been cooked into a soft mass like my comrades."

"Nor should I have met with a better fate," said the straw; "the old woman has turned my brothers into fire and smoke, sixty of them she took up at once and deprived of life. Very luckily I managed to slip through her fingers."

"What had we better do now?" said the coal.

"I think," answered the bean, "that as we have been so lucky as to escape with our lives, we will join in good fellowship together, and, lest any more bad fortune should happen to us here, we will go abroad into foreign lands."