“Get along with you!” answered the merchant. “Why you couldn’t creep into that wheel there, and yet you talk about chinks!”
“I can’t creep into that wheel? See if I don’t go clean out of sight in it!”
Woe slipped into the wheel; the merchant caught up the oaken wedge, and drove it into the axle-box from the other side. Then he seized the wheel and flung it, with Woe in it, into the river. Woe was drowned, and the merchant began to live again as he had been wont to do of old.
In a variant of this story found in the Tula Government we have, in the place of woe, Nuzhda, or Need. The poor brother and his wife are returning home disconsolately from a party given by the rich brother in honor of his son’s marriage. But a draught of water which they take by the way gets into their heads, and they set up a song.
“There are two of them singing (says the story), but three voices prolong the strain.
“‘Whoever is that?’ say they.
“‘Thy Need,’ answers some one or other.
“‘What, my good mother Need!’
“So saying the man laid hold of her, and took her down from his shoulders—for she was sitting on them. And he found a horse’s head and put her inside it, and flung it into a swamp. And afterwards he began to lead a new life—impossible to live more prosperously.”
Of course the rich brother becomes envious and takes Need out of the swamp, whereupon she clings to him so tightly that he cannot get rid of her, and he becomes utterly ruined.[235]