The Three Sluggards
A certain king had three sons, all of whom he loved so much that he did not know which he should name to be king after him. When the day of his death approached, he called them to his bedside, and thus spoke to them: “Dear children, I have something on my mind that I wish to tell you; whichever of you is the laziest, he shall be king when I am dead.”
“Then, father, the kingdom belongs to me,” said the eldest son; “for I am so lazy, that if I lie down to sleep, and tears come into my eyes, so that I cannot close them, I yet go to sleep without wiping them away!”
“The kingdom belongs to me,” cried the second son; “for I am so lazy that when I sit by the fire to warm myself, I allow my boots to scorch before I will draw away my feet!”
But the third son said: “The kingdom is mine, father, for I am so lazy that, were I about to be hanged, and even had I the rope round my neck, and any one should give me a sharp sword to cut it with, I should suffer myself to be swung off before I took the trouble to cut the rope!”
As soon as the father heard this, he said to his youngest son: “You have shown yourself the laziest of all, and you shall be king.”
The Fisherman and his Wife
There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a miserable little hovel close to the sea. He went to fish every day, and he fished and fished, and at last one day, when he was sitting looking deep down into the shining water, he felt something on his line. When he hauled it up there was a great flounder on the end of the line. The flounder said to him: “Look here, fisherman, don’t you kill me; I am no common flounder, I am an enchanted prince! What good will it do you to kill me? I sha’n’t be good to eat; put me back into the water, and leave me to swim about.”
“Well,” said the fisherman, “you need not make so many words about it. I am quite ready to put back a flounder that can talk.” And so saying, he put back the flounder into the shining water, and it sank down to the bottom, leaving a streak of blood behind it.
Then the fisherman got up and went back to his wife in the hovel. “Husband,” she said, “hast thou caught nothing today?”