“This should be the place,” says he. So he lies down and waits with one wily eye shut and one wily eye open.
Presently who should trip into the dell but the fairies’ children! Very fresh they were as they moved among the pine-tree trunks.
“Leader! Leader! Fetch us the mallet,” they cried. Up stepped the leader and lifted away the mossy stone. And behold there was no mallet there!
Now the fairies’ children became very angry. They stamped their little feet, and cried and rushed wildly to and fro, and were beside themselves altogether because the mallet was gone.
“See,” cried the leader at last, “see this ugly old farmer man; he must have taken our mallet. Let us pull his nose for him.”
With a shrill scream the fairies’ children set upon Cho. They pinched him, and pulled him, and buffeted him, and set their sharp teeth in his flesh till he yelled in agony. Worst of all, they laid hold of his nose and pulled it. Long it grew, and longer. It reached his waist. It reached his feet.
Lord, how they laughed, the fairies’ children! Then they scampered away like fallen leaves before the wind.
Cho sighed, and he groaned, and he cursed, and he swore, but for all that his nose was not an inch shorter. So, sad and sorry, he gathered it up in his two hands and went to Kanè’s house.
“Kanè, I am very sick,” says he.
“Indeed, so I see,” says Kanè, “a terrible sickness; and how did you catch it?” he says. And so kind he was that he never laughed at Cho’s nose, nor yet he never smiled, but there were tears in his eyes at his brother’s misfortunes. Then Cho’s heart melted and he told his brother all the tale, and he never kept back how mean he had been about the dead silk-worms’ eggs, and about the other things that have been told of. And he asked Kanè to forgive him and to help him.