The carpenter took his saw and plane, trimmed the planks, and struck the nails as lightly as possible with his hammer, so as not to let the iron points enter farther into the poor woman’s heart than into the wood.
When the work was finished, it was so carefully and so well done that it might have been taken for a box to put jewels and laces in.
“Carpenter, as you have made so beautiful a coffin for my little Hans, I give you my house at the end of the village, and the little garden behind it, and the well with the vineyard.—You shall not wait long.”
With the shroud and the coffin, which she held under her arm, it was so small, she went through the village streets, and the children, who do not know what death is, said:
“Look at Hans’s mother taking him a beautiful box of toys from Nuremberg; it must be a town with its painted and varnished wooden houses, its steeple covered with tin-foil, its belfry and its tower with battlements, and its trees in the promenades, all curly and green; or else a beautiful violin with its sculptured pegs at the neck and its horsehair bow.—Oh, why have we not a box like it!”
And the mothers, growing pale, kissed them and told them to be quiet:
“Silly children that you are, you must not say that; do not wish for the box of toys, or the violin-case that one carries with tears under one’s arm: you will have it soon enough, poor little ones!”
When Hans’s mother got home, she took the dainty, still pretty, corpse of her son and began to make his last toilet—it must be made carefully, for it has to last for eternity.
She clothed him in his Sunday clothes, his silk dress and fur pelisse, so that he should not be cold in the damp place to which he was going. Beside him she put the doll with the enamel eyes, the doll he loved so much that he always took it to bed with him.
But, just as she was turning down the shroud on the body which she had kissed for the last time a thousand times, she saw that she had forgotten to place his pretty little red slippers on the child’s feet.