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whit! Tu-whoo! Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! what delightful weather we are
having!"
On and on went the two Woodcutters, blowing lustily upon
their fingers, and stamping with their huge iron-shod boots upon the
caked snow. Once they sank into a deep drift, and came out as white
as millers are, when the stones are grinding; and once they slipped on
the hard smooth ice where the marsh-water was frozen, and their
faggots fell out of their bundles, and they had to pick them up and
bind them together again; and once they thought that they had lost
their way, and a great terror seized on them, for they knew that the
Snow is cruel to those who sleep in her arms. But they put their trust
in the good Saint Martin, who watches over all travellers, and
retraced their steps, and went warily, and at last they reached the
outskirts of the forest, and saw, far down in the valley beneath them,
the lights of the village in which they dwelt.
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed
aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the
Moon like a flower of gold.
Yet, after that they had laughed they became sad, for they
remembered their poverty, and one of them said to the other, "Why
did we make merry, seeing that life is for the rich, and not for such as
we are? Better that we had died of cold in the forest, or that some
wild beast had fallen upon us and slain us."
"Truly," answered his companion, "much is given to some, and
little is given to others. Injustice has parcelled out the world, nor is
there equal division of aught save of sorrow."
But as they were bewailing their misery to each other this
strange thing happened. There fell from heaven a very bright and
beautiful star. It slipped down the side of the sky, passing by the other
stars in its course, and, as they watched it wondering, it seemed to
them to sink behind a clump of willow-trees that stood hard by a little
sheepfold no more than a stone's-throw away.
"Why! there is a crock of gold for whoever finds it," they cried,
and they set to and ran, so eager were they for the gold.
And one of them ran faster than his mate, and outstripped him,
and forced his way through the willows, and came out on the other
side, and lo! there was indeed a thing of gold lying on the white
snow. So he hastened towards it, and stooping down placed his hands
upon it, and it was a cloak of golden tissue, curiously wrought with