On the next Sunday, as the woman was getting ready to go to mass, she said to the boy: “Cook the soup and boil the meat and roast this duck; we will have a good dinner to-day. See that you have all done and ready when I come home.”
“Very well; it shall all be done,” answered the boy.
When the woman was gone he cooked the soup and boiled the meat, and then he put the duck upon the spit to roast. When he saw what a delicious brown crisp was forming all over the duck, he thought, “It can roast itself another one,” and ate the crisp all off. He turned the spit and turned it, but the second brown crisp never came.
When he saw this, he thought: “When the mistress comes home she will pepper me well,” and he began to consider how he could escape a beating. In his desperation he remembered the jar of poison against which his mistress had warned him the day before. With a sudden resolution he went into the storeroom and devoured the whole jarful of preserved fruit, and then crouched down in a corner to wait for death.
Presently his mistress came home and cried out angrily: “What have you done to this duck?” She was about to belabor him well, when he cried: “Ah, leave me in peace, dear mistress! I shall die in a minute, anyway, for I have eaten up all the poison!”
At this the woman broke out into a laugh and could not refuse to forgive him. The duck and the preserves, however, were gone all the same.
Hudden and Dudden and Donald O’Neary
There was once upon a time two farmers, and their names were Hudden and Dudden. They had poultry in their yards, sheep on the uplands, and scores of cattle in the meadow land alongside the river. But for all that they weren’t happy, for just between their two farms there lived a poor man by the name of Donald O’Neary. He had a hovel over his head and a strip of grass that was barely enough to keep his one cow, Daisy, from starving, and, though she did her best, it was but seldom that Donald got a drink of milk or a roll of butter from Daisy. You would think there was little here to make Hudden and Dudden jealous, but so it is, the more one has the more one wants, and Donald’s neighbors lay awake of nights scheming how they might get hold of his little strip of grass land. Daisy, poor thing, they never thought of; she was just a bag of bones.
One day Hudden met Dudden, and they were soon grumbling as usual, and all to the tune of “If only we could get that vagabond, Donald O’Neary, out of the country.”
“Let’s kill Daisy,” said Hudden at last; “if that doesn’t make him clear out, nothing will.”