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was a very large stone—larger even than Bulka had thought. It looked as if it had lain there for a very long time; almost as if it had always been there, and the potato patch and the garden and even the house itself had just grown up around it. There might very well be treasure there; it might even be a magic stone, by the look of it.

“The first thing to do,” said Poor Cecco, “is to measure off the ground.”

He began at once to measure it off in paces, five times his own length, counting the tail, and that brought him halfway down one of the furrows of the potato patch. There he found a little twig and stuck it up in the earth to mark the spot.

“That’s five lengths,” he explained, “and now if we measure five lengths from here again, in a straight line, it brings us back to the stone, and that shows exactly where we’ve got to dig.”

The others stood and watched him in admiration. It was all so perfectly simple and came out just right, only the Easter Chicken said: