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The STRAW. The COAL andthe BEANI
|HERE lived in a certain village a poor
old woman who had collected a mess
of beans, and was going to cook them.
So she made a fire on her hearth,
and, in order to make it burn better,
she put in a handful of straw. When
the beans began to bubble in the pot,
one of them fell out and lay, never
noticed, near a straw which was already
there ; soon a red-hot coal jumped out of the fire and joined
the pair. ‘The straw began first, and said,
“Dear friends, how do you come here?” The coal
answered,
"TI jumped out of the fire by great good luck, or I should
certainly have met with my death. I should have been
burned to ashes.” ‘The bean said,
‘“T too have come out of it with a whole skin, but if the
old woman had kept me in the pot I should have been
cooked into a soft mass like my comrades.”
- Nor should I have met with a better fate,’ said the
straw ; " the old-woman has turned my brothers into fire and
smoke, sixty of them she took up at once and deprived of
life. Very luckily I managed to slip through her fingers.”
“What had we better do now ? " said the coal.
“ I think,” answered the bean, "that as we have been so
lucky as to escape with our lives, we will join in good fellow¬
ship together, and, lest any more bad fortune should happen
to us here, we will go abroad into foreign lands,”
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