Page:The crimson fairy book (IA crimsonfairybook00lang).pdf/180

 carry you will have sufficient to last your lifetime, and you may return three times; but woe betide you if you venture to come a fourth time. You would have your trouble for your pains, and would be punished for your greediness by falling down the stone steps and breaking your leg. Do not neglect each time to heap back the loose earth which concealed the entrance of the king’s treasure chamber.”

‘As the apparition left off speaking my dog pricked up his ears and began to bark. I heard the crack of a carter’s whip and the noise of wheels in the distance, and when I looked again the spectre had disappeared.’

So ended the shepherd’s tale; and the landlord who was listening with the rest, said shrewdly:

‘Tell us now, Father Martin, did you go to the mountain and find what the spirit promised you; or is it a fable?’

‘Nay, nay,’ answered the greybeard. ‘I cannot tell if the spectre lied, for never a step did I go towards finding the hollow, for two reasons:—one was that my neck was too precious for me to risk it in such a snare as that; the other, that no one could ever tell me where the spring-root was to be found.’

Then Blaize, another aged shepherd, lifted up his voice.

Tis a pity, Father Martin, that your secret has grown old with you. If you had told it forty years ago truly you would not long have been lacking the spring-root. Even though you will never climb the mountain now, I will tell you, for a joke, how it is to be found. The easiest way to get it is by the help of a black woodpecker. Look, in the spring, where she builds her nest in a hole in a tree, and when the time comes for her brood to fly off block up the entrance to the nest with a hard sod, and lurk in ambush behind the tree till the bird returns to feed her nestlings. When she perceives that she cannot get into her nest she will fly round the tree uttering cries