Page:Legends of Rubezahl, and Other Tales (1845).djvu/192

 of them, was not indisposed, now and then, to do a kindness to any particular member of the sex in whom he conceived an interest. In the present instance, in exact proportion to the good-will for herself and her children with which the exemplary conduct of the hard-working, enduring villager had inspired the Gnome, was his desire to visit with condign punishment the niggardly brute at whose hands she suffered such sore oppression. He determined forthwith to play him a trick that should at once horribly distress and discomfit him, and place him in such a position that his wife should have completely the upperhand of him, and, if she still desired to do so, pull the house about his ears, as she said. With this intent he mounted a tearing east wind, and dashed off over hill and valley in the direction of Bohemia, and wherever, on highroad or bye-road, he descried a traveller with a pack, down he dropped behind him, and his all-piercing eyes investigated the nature of the man’s load. As luck would have it, he came across no one carrying glass, or ten to one, even though it had not been the man he sought, the poor wretch’s stock would have been smashed to atoms, Rubezahl’s anger involving, for the time, all glass-pedlers in his just indignation against their unworthy brother Stephen.

At length, while soaring above the mountain itself, his infallible eye detected the object of his search.