As soon as he saw the oat cake he was wide awake again in a moment. [Page 209]
the man and his wife had to go back home without it, the man with his bare legs, and the neighbors peeking out at him from behind their window curtains.
By this time it was dark. “I’ll have to hurry if I want to find a place to-night where I can sleep in quiet,” said the oat cake.
So now it rolled along more briskly, and presently it came to a pasture, and it leaped and bounded across it at a great rate, for it was all downhill, and then suddenly—plunk!—it fell down into a fox’s hole.
The fox was at home and half asleep, but as soon as he saw the oat cake, he was wide awake again in a moment. The fox had had nothing to eat all day, and he did not stop to look twice at the oat cake, but bit it in half and swallowed it down in a trice and with no words about it.
So the oat cake slept quiet after all its wanderings, but it might as well have been eaten by the farmer in the first place.
THE DREAMER
An English Story
There once lived a man and his wife, named Peter and Kate, and they were so poor that they had scarcely enough bread to put in their mouths. They lived in a wretched, miserable hut, and in front of the hut was a river, and back of it a patch of ground and a gnarled old apple tree.
One night when Peter was sleeping he dreamed a dream, and in this dream a tall old man dressed in gray, and with a long gray beard came to him and said, “Peter, I know that you have had a hard life, and have neither grumbled nor complained, and now I have a mind to help you. Follow down the river until you come to a bridge. On the other side of the river you will see a town. Take up your stand on the bridge and wait there patiently. It may be that nothing will happen the first day, and it may be that nothing will happen the second day either, but if you do not lose courage, but still wait patiently, some time during the third day some one will come to you, and tell you something that will make your fortune for you.”