The Little Peasant
HERE was once a village in which there was only one poor Peasant; all the others were very well-to-do, so they called him the Little Peasant. He had not even got a single cow, far less money with which to buy one, though he and his Wife would have been so glad to possess one.
One day he said to his Wife, ‘Look here, I have a good idea: there is my Godfather, the joiner, he shall make us a wooden calf and paint it brown, so that it looks like a real one, and perhaps some day it will grow into a cow.’
This plan pleased his Wife, so his Godfather, the joiner, cut out and carved the calf and painted it properly, and made its head bent down to look as if it were eating.
Next morning, when the cows were driven out, the Little Peasant called the Cowherd in, and said: ‘Look here, I have a little calf, but it is very small and has to be carried.’
The Cowherd said: ‘All right,’ took it in his arms, carried it to the meadow and put it down in the grass.
The calf stood there all day and appeared to be eating, and the Cowherd said, ‘It will soon be able to walk by itself; see how it eats.’
In the evening, when he was going home, he said to the calf, ‘If you can stand there all day and eat your fill, you may just walk home on your own legs, I don’t mean to carry you!’
But the Little Peasant was standing by his door waiting for the calf, and when the Cowherd came through the village without it, he at once asked where it was.
The Cowherd said, ‘It is still standing there; it would not stop eating to come with us.’
