give it. I like to have it now quite as well as at another time." St. Paul said, "Brother Peter, give her the power of making three wishes, as you gave the other woman, for after all that is what she wants." So Peter did this, and the two Saints departed. Scarcely were they out of sight, before she wished that her house and all her possessions might be burnt to the ground, which happened immediately. In the meantime her husband came driving across the fields, and when he saw that his house was in flames he ran up and cried, "Fire! fire! dear friends help to put it out!" The woman, angry with him for wanting to put it out, cried, "Oh, call out that the fire is to go inside you." This was instantly fulfilled, and thus were two wishes used up. The poor man who had the fire inside him was suffering great pain: it was impossible to extinguish it, and no one could remove it. In order to save his life, his wife was forced to deliver him by means of her third and last wish. An Austrian story in which the three wishes of the poor man likewise turn out to his advantage, is to be found in Ziska, No. 3, under the title Tausendfache Vergeltung. Meier has divided it into two stories, Nos. 40 and 65. Lehmann mentions the saga in a somewhat rough manner in the Erneuerter Polit. Blumengarten (Frankf. 1640), p. 371. "It often happens that a man has good fortune but no blessing with it, like the woman whom St. Peter permitted to make three wishes for her own benefit; for in the first place she wished for beautiful golden hair, and then for a brush." And then because of the brush, the man made a bad wish, the consequences of which he had to remove again by a third. This presentation of the story in which the wishes turn out ill, comes rather near the story of Gambling Hänsel (No. 82). Perrault (see Les Souhaits ridicules) and Beaumont (2. 74) only relate this part, and in their own fashion. The old French Fabliau Les quatre Souhaits de S. Martin (Méon, 4. 386), is quite of an ordinary kind; and so is the story in the Ευντίπας, which Keller quotes in the introduction to Li romans des sept Sages, clxxxi. In Hebel's Schatzkästlein (p. 117), good as the story is, much of the saga itself has degenerated. While the woman is sitting by the fire with her husband, she, without thinking of the gifts, wishes that she had a fried sausage. It appears, and in over-haste, the man wishes the sausage was growing on the end of her nose, and then fur his third wish has to wish that it may fall off.
The first part of our story, the modest wishes of the pious people with whom God has stayed, clearly contains the ancient saga of Philemon and Baucis ( Ovid. Met. 8. 617: compare Notes by Vossius to his eighteenth Idyll, where other stories are mentioned). The Indians have it also in a peculiar form. The Brahmin Soodam and his wife live in the greatest poverty, but this does not lessen their trust in God. His occupation is prayer, and while engaged in it, he
