His mother, being uneasy, went to consult a venerable priest, who said to her:
“I will watch beside you to-night, and I will question the little ghost; he will answer me; I know what words to say to innocent or guilty spirits.”
Hans appeared at the usual hour, and the priest summoned him, in the consecrated words, to tell him what troubled him in the other world.
“It is the bread shoes which torment me, and hinder me from mounting the diamond staircase of Paradise; they are heavier on my feet than postilion’s boots and I cannot get past the first two or three steps, and that troubles me greatly, for I see above a cloud of beautiful cherubim with rosy wings who are calling to me to play with them and are showing me toys of silver and gold.”
Having said these words, he disappeared.
The good priest, to whom Hans’s mother had made her confession, said to her:
“You have committed a grave fault, you have profaned the daily bread, the sacred bread, our good God’s bread, the bread that Jesus Christ, at his last repast, chose to represent his body, and, after having refused a slice of it to the poor man who came to your door, you kneaded from it slippers for your Hans.
“You must open the coffin, take the bread shoes off the child’s feet, and burn them in the all-purifying fire.”
Accompanied by the grave-digger and the mother, the priest proceeded to the cemetery: with four blows of the spade the coffin was laid bare, and was opened.
Hans was lying inside, just as his mother had laid him there, but his face bore an expression of pain.