‘Very well reasoned,’ said the count. ‘We quite understand each other, then?’
‘Perfectly,’ replied both husband and wife.
‘You come to live at my palace, and have everything you can want there, so long as you don’t open one dish[2] which there will be in the middle of the table. If you open that you go back to your former way of life.’
‘We quite understand,’ answered the peasants.
The count went in and called his servant, and told him to give the peasants an apartment to themselves, with everything they could want, and a sumptuous dinner, only in the middle of the table was to be an earthen dish, into which he was to put a little bird alive, so that if one lifted the cover the bird would fly out. He was to stay in the room and wait on them, and report to him what happened.
The old people sat down to dinner, and praised everything they saw, so delightful it all seemed.
‘Look! that’s the dish we’re not to touch,’ said the wife.
‘No; better not look at it,’ said the husband.
‘Pshaw! there’s no danger of wanting to open it, when we have such a lot of dishes to eat our fill out of,’ returned the wife.
So they set to, and made such a repast as they had never dreamed of before. By degrees, however, as the novelty of the thing wore off, they grew more and more desirous for something newer and newer still. Though when they at first sat down it had seemed that two dishes would be ample to satisfy them, they had now had seven or eight and they were wishing there might be others coming. There is an end to all things human, and no other came; there only remained the earthen dish in the middle of the table.