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A simple mountaineer, whose greatest ambition was to own a horse, worked and saved with the utmost diligence until he had amassed a sum sufficient to purchase a colt. Thinking it would be very delightful to watch the gradual development of this animal into the coveted steed, the good man tied up his savings in a corner of his handkerchief, and taking his sharpest-pointed staff set out long before day-break for Aigle, where he knew a large horse and cattle fair was held.
After a long, fatiguing tramp down the steep Ormond mountains, the sturdy mountaineer reached the valley, and entering the town of Aigle, proceeded to examine every horse and foal on the market, with the laudable aim of securing the best animal he could for his money. Pricing them one after another, he found, to his intense dismay, that his savings were not sufficient to pay for the smallest colt offered for sale there, and that he would have to return home without having made the desired purchase.
A charlatan, who had slyly watched him for some time, now stepped up to him, and before long drew from the unsophisticated mountaineer a detailed account of his long cherished hopes and of his present bitter disappointment. After listening with feigned sympathy to the whole story, the charlatan suggested that if the peasant’s means would not permit his buying a foal, he ought to purchase a mare’s egg; adding that a cow could hatch it, and suckle the foal until it was old enough to eat grass.
The peasant, delighted with this suggestion, promptly expressed a fervent desire to buy a mare’s egg if such a treasure could only be secured. Assuring him there would be no difficulty about that, the charlatan led the peasant to another part of the town, and after threading his way amid countless bags and baskets of fruit and vegetables exposed for sale, he finally stopped before a cart in which lay a huge yellow squash.
“There is a fine mare’s egg!” cried the charlatan to the peasant, making a sign to his accomplice, the proprietor of both squash and cart. The mountaineer, who had never seen a squash in his life, stared at it in awe and wonder, and after asking countless questions and doing considerable chaffering, he decided to purchase it. To carry it home safely, he then tied it up in his huge handkerchief, which he hung on the end of his stick over his shoulder.
He was so elated by his purchase, and by the potations he had indulged in with his friend, the charlatan, while closing the bargain, that he set out for home trolling a merry song. Climbing higher and higher, he revelled in joyful anticipations of his wife’s surprise, and of the time when the huge egg he carried would be safely hatched and a pretty foal would come at his call.
While walking near the edge of a precipice, glancing from time to time down its steep sides covered with jagged rocks and stunted bushes, the knots in the handkerchief, loosened by the weight of the squash, suddenly came undone, and the startled peasant beheld his precious purchase bounding from rock to rock down the precipitous slope! As he stood there, motionless in utter despair, the squash dashed with such force against a sharp stone that it flew into pieces which scattered far and wide.
At the same moment, a brown hare, hiding in a bush near by, sprang in terror from its cover and darted down the mountain. The peasant, thinking this was the desired colt, accidentally released from the shattered egg, loudly called: “Coltie, Coltie, come here!” and wrung his hands in helpless grief when he saw the fleet brown creature disappear.
After vainly watching for hours for its return, the peasant sorrowfully went home, and spent the evening relating his various adventures to his wife. And, as long as he lived, he talked of the remarkable horse which he would have had, had not the fleet-footed colt run away as soon as hatched from the mare’s egg bought on the market-place at Aigle.