Little Finger [antikvár]

A fairy tale about the wiSe Little Finger, showing that brains are better than brawn. From the French, by Laboulaye I A long time ago, in a very strange country, there lived a farmer who had three sons: Peter, Paul and Johnny. Peter was big and fat, with a red face and very little brains. Paul was sickly and pale, fiiled with envy and jealousy. Johnny was as pretty as a woman and more nimble than a spring, but so small that he could hide in one of his fatheKs boots. Nobody called him John; everybody called him Little Finger. The farmer was so poor that everybody celebrated whenever he brought in a penny.Bread-even black bread-cost a lot, and the family had no way to make a living. As soon as his three sons were big enough, their father begged them, for their own sakes, to leave that unhappy hővel and seek their fortunes. They agreed, but they were very sad to leave their old father and say farewell forever to the trees they had planted, the little house in which they had been born and the stream from which they had drunk water from the palms of their hands. Around three miles away, the King of the country had a magnificent palace, made of wood, with twenty balconies of carved oak and six little windows. And it happened that, suddenly one night when it was very hot, an enormous oak tree with such thick branches and so many leaves sprang up out of the earth in front of the six windows, that it cut off all the light from the King's palace. It was a magic tree, and there was no ax that could cut it down, because the edges of axes shattered against the hard wood of its trunk, and, for each branch that was cut off, two more took its place. The King offered to give three bags full of money to anyone who could get the monster tree away from the palace, but the oak was still there, growing more branches and roots, and