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144 of strawberries with milk, and of stewed mushrooms, and so long as she had these dainties on her table she never punished Yanechek, and he might run and bathe in the pool as often as he liked.

One day, when the dainty shepherdess had some mushrooms for dinner, Yanechek went to the pool, ran up the steep bank and plunged into the calm water. He began to gambol about, dive, and then rising again stuck his legs up in the air. All at once he raised up his head, stretched out his arms and screamed for help as if in the agonies of death. The labourers in the field, hearing his cries ran to his assistance. They seized him by the hair of the head and drew him to land. There the wretched boy lay lifeless; he neither moved nor breathed. The peasants laid him on his stomach, so that the water might run from him more freely, and not knowing what next to do, some ran for the shepherdess and some for the doctor.

Shepherdess Dorothy had just begun to eat her stewed mushrooms when the country people brought her the sad news that her son was drowned. Horror-stricken, she dropped the wooden spoon, and pale and with her hair hanging loose, rushed towards the pool to her poor boy Yanechek. But the miserable boy was nowhere to be found: in vain they sought for his body among the bushes, in the fields, and in the water. When the