Page:The Children Who Followed the Piper.djvu/43



HIS was Old Couple's House, the Piper told the children. Once, long and long ago, before the gods had lost their high places, Jupiter and Mercury went through the world. They seemed poor and hungry men going to different houses for food and shelter. As they went through the world they were made sad and angry because of the hard-heartedness of men; every house of the thousand houses they came to turned them away.

At last they came to a very little house; it was the poorest of all the houses they had been near; there was a little garden beside it, with cabbages and a few fruit trees, and there was a