The next morning the new cook cried out when she called me:
"Good gracious! what have you been doing to your face?"
"The witchcraft is beginning to take effect," I thought, with a sinking heart.
But the cook laughed so heartily that I also smiled involuntarily, and peeped into her glass. My face was thickly smeared with soot.
"Sascha did this?" I asked.
"Or I," laughed the cook.
When I began to clean the boots, the first boot into which I put my hand had a pin in the lining, which ran into my finger.
"This is his witchcraft!"
There were pins or needles in all the boots, put in so skilfully that they always pricked my palm. Then I took a bowl of cold water, and with great pleasure poured it over the head of the wizard, who was either not awake or was pretending to sleep.
But all the same I was miserable. I was always thinking of the coffin containing the sparrow, with its gray crooked claws and its waxen bill pathetically sticking upward, and all around the colored gleams which seemed to be trying unsuccessfully to form themselves into a rainbow. In my imagination the coffin was enlarged, the claws of the bird grew, stretched upward quivering, were alive.