“Oh,” said her father, “she’s sharp enough.”
“Yes, indeed!” said her mother; “she can see the wind coming up the street, and hear the flies coughing.”
“Very well,” replied Hans; “but if she is not really clever, I won’t have her.”
When they were all sitting together at dinner the mother said, “Alice, go down into the cellar and draw some beer.” [[106]]
[[107]]
So Clever Alice took the jug from the nail on the wall, and went into the cellar, tapping the lid up and down as she went to pass away the time. When she reached the cellar she fetched a chair and put it in front of the cask so that she need not stoop and hurt her back. Then she held the jug in her hand and turned the tap. While the beer was running, as she did not wish to be idle, she let her eyes wander all over the wall, looking first this way and then that. All at once she saw just above her head a pickax, which the masons had accidentally left there.
Then Clever Alice began to cry, saying, “If I marry Hans, and we have a child, and he grows up, and we send him into the cellar here to draw beer, then the pickax will fall on his head and kill him.”
So she sat and wept and cried with all her might over the misfortune which lay before her.
The people upstairs waited for the beer, but still Clever Alice did not come. At last her mother said to the maid, “Go down into [[108]]the cellar and see why Clever Alice is staying so long.”