Poor Jack pleaded all he could, and said he did not mean to, but curiosity got the best of him, and he thought he would open the door and peep in.
Says the Giant, “No man before ever opened that stable door and lived to tell it, and you, too, would be a dead man this minute only for one thing. Your father’s father did my father a great service once. I am the man who never forgets a good thing, and for that service,” says he, “I give you your life and pardon this time; but if you ever do the like again, you won’t live.”
Jack, he promised that surely and surely he would never do the like again. His supper he got that night, and to bed. And at early morning again the Giant had him up, and, “Jack,” says he, “I must be off to the other end of the world again and fight the Giant of the Four Winds. You know your duty is -- look after this house and place and set everything in order about it, and go everywhere you like, only don’t open the stable door or go into the stable, on the peril of your life.”
“I will mind all that,” says Jack.
Then that morning again the Giant visited the stable before he went away. And after the Giant had gone, to his work went Jack, wandering through the house, cleaning and setting everything in order about it, and out into the yard he went, and fixed and arranged everything out there, except the stable. He stood before the stable door a good while this day, and says he to himself, “I wonder how the bear and the mare are doing, and what the Giant did when he went in to see them? I would give a great deal to know,” says he. “I will take a peep in.”
Into the ring of the door he put his finger, and turned it, and looked in, and there he saw the mare and the bear standing as on the day before and neither of them eating. In Jack steps. “And no wonder, poor creatures,” says he,.“you don’t eat, when that is the way the Giant blundered,” he says, after he saw the meat before the mare and the hay before the bear this time also.
Jack then changed the food, putting the hay before the mare and the meat before the bear as it should be, and very soon both the mare and the bear were eating heartily; and then Jack went out. He closed the door, and when he did so, his finger stuck in the ring; and pull and struggle though Jack did, he could not get it out.
“Och, och, och,” says Jack, says he, “I am a dead man to-day surely.”
He whips out his knife, and cuts off his finger, and leaves it there, and ’twas there when the Giant came home that night.
“Well, Jack, my fine boy,” says he, “how have you got on to-day?”