forest, and twisted them together with snakes. Then he had to take the cows to the pasture; and the housewife out of revenge baked a stone in his bread, which blunted his knife, so in his rage he called bears and wolves to devour the herd. He, however, made himself horns of the cows' bones and oxen's horns, and drove home the wolves and bears instead of the other herd. The Norse Grettir plays similar pranks when he has to tend geese and horses (Bernskubraugd Kinderstreiche). The hero-nature breaks forth in youthful rudeness and contempt for man's occupations; Florens destroys the oxen of Clemens in the same way in Octavian.
A story from Hesse is much more incomplete, but has a character of its own. Kürdchen Bingeling has been fed at his mother's breast for seven years, by which he has grown so immensely big, and is able to eat so much that there is no satisfying him; and there is no man whom he does not torment and befool. So the whole community assembles together to catch and kill him; he however observes this, and sits down beneath the door and blocks the way just as Gargantua creates Mount Gargant, near Nantes; no one is able to enter without spades and shovels; and he goes quietly away. Now he is in another village, but he is still the same rascal, and the whole community again rises to seize him, but as there is no door he leaps into a well. Then everyone in the village stands round it, and takes counsel what to do, and at length they decide to throw a mill-stone down on his head. With great difficulty one is brought, and is rolled down, but just when they think he must be dead, his head, which he has thrust through the hole in the mill-stone, which now rests on his shoulders, suddenly comes out of the well, and he cries, "What a fine plaited collar I have got on!" When they see that, they take counsel together anew, and send to fetch their great bell from the church-tower and throw it down on him, which must certainly hit him (just as with Giant Scharmack). However, just as they, feeling sure that he is lying killed down below, have separated, he suddenly leaps out of the well with the bell on his head, and says quite joyously, "Oh, what a fine rush cap!" and runs away. The ballad Strong Hans, by Wezel, in Seckendorf and Stoll's journal Prometheus, i. p. 79, is connected with this. He goes as apprentice to a smith, and strikes such a trial blow on the anvil, that it is driven into the earth. Then he tears up oak-trees by the roots, and flings a cart and horses over the door into the yard. Finally, he falls in with the Devil who is just amusing himself by throwing stones into the air; he says he is throwing them at the angels to drive them away. Hans wants to throw with him for a wager and the Devil agrees to it. It is arranged that if the Devil loses, he is to go away from the place, and a cross is to be set up there. The Evil One throws a fragment of rock as big as a church, and throws
