Page:Czechoslovak fairy tales.djvu/176

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152
CZECHOSLOVAK FAIRY TALES

But a long, long beard
Hangs from my chin.
Open the door
And let me in!”

Then Dorla was very frightened and she hid in the corner. Long Beard broke open the door and he caught Dorla and he shook her out of her skin. It served her right, too, for she was a wicked, spiteful girl and she had never been kind to anybody in her life.

Long Beard left her bones in a heap on the floor, and he hung her skin on the nail at the back of the door. Then he put her grinning skull in the window.

On the third day Dorla’s mother gave her husband a brand new table-cloth and said:

“Go now and see how my Dorla is getting on. Here is a table-cloth for the ducats.”

So the man took the table-cloth and went to the mountains. As he came near the hut, he saw something in the window that looked like grinning teeth. He said to himself:

“Dorla must be very happy to be smiling at me from this distance.”

But when he reached the hut all he found of Dorla