“I give you greeting and thanks for your coming. What can I do for you?”
The Boy answered: “I give you back your greeting, and I am come for the meal which you have taken away from me, for we have none left in the house.”
Then he told how for three days the North Wind had come and taken the meal as he returned with it from the safe, and now there was nothing to eat in the house.
“I have not got your meal,” said the North Wind, “but I will give you a magic cloth which, whenever you say to it, ‘Cloth, serve forth a dinner,’ will provide you with all that you can eat and drink in a moment.”
So the boy took the cloth and started for his home, but as he had a long way to go he stopped over night at an inn, and, being hungry, and wanting to test the cloth, he sat down at a table and unfolded it before him, saying: “Cloth, serve forth a dinner.” Immediately there was served upon the cloth all sorts of good things to eat—such food as the Boy had never eaten before in his life.
“It is indeed a magic cloth,” said the Boy, when, the dinner eaten, he folded the cloth carefully and put it under his pillow before he slept.
Now, the inn-keeper had been a witness to the thing which had happened, and had heard the words which the Boy said to the cloth, so he decided that he must possess so wonderful a thing as that, for it would save him much labor. Accordingly, after the Boy had gone to sleep, he stole quietly into the room and slipped the wallet from under the Boy’s pillow and put into it a cloth of his own exactly like it.
When the Boy reached home the next day his mother asked him if he had been to the North Wind, and if he had brought back the meal.
The Boy said: “The North Wind was glad to see me, and thanked me for coming, but said he did not have the meal. Instead, he gave me a magic cloth, so that we need never be hungry again, for it will serve us a dinner at any time we bid it.”
So he took the cloth from his wallet and unfolded it on the table, as he had done at the inn, and said: “Cloth, serve forth a dinner.” But, as it was not a magic cloth, nothing happened.