At the end of three weeks I was so exhausted with sheer hunger that I could hardly stand on my legs.  One day, when my miserable, covetous thief of a master had gone out, an angel, in the likeness of a tinker, knocked at the door, and inquired whether I had anything to mend.  Suddenly a light flashed upon me.  “I have lost the key of this chest,” said I, “can you fit it?” He drew forth a bunch of keys, fitted it, and lo! the lid of the chest arose.  “I have no money,” I said to my preserver, “but give me the key and help yourself.”  He helped himself, and so, when he had gone, did I.

But it was not predestined for me that such good luck should continue long; for on the third day I beheld the priest turning and counting the loaves over and over again.  At last he said, “If I were not assured of the security of this chest, I should say that somebody had stolen my bread; but from this day I shall count the loaves; there remain now exactly nine and a piece.”

“May nine curses light upon you, you miserable beggar!” said I to myself.  The utmost I dared do, for some days, was to nibble here and there a morsel of the crust.  At last it occurred to me that the chest was old and in parts broken.  Might it not be supposed that rats had made an entrance?  I therefore picked one loaf after another until I made up a tolerable supply of crumbs, which I ate like so many sugar-plums.

The priest, when he returned, beheld the havoc with dismay.

“Confound the rats!” quoth he.  “There is no keeping anything from them.”  I fared well at dinner, for he pared off all the places which he supposed the rats had nibbled at, and gave them to me, saying, “There, eat that; rats are very clean animals.”  But I received another shock when I beheld my tormentor nailing pieces of wood over all the holes in the chest.  All I could do was to scrape other holes with an old knife; and so it went on until the priest set a trap for the rats, baiting it with bits of cheese that he begged from his neighbours.  I did not nibble my bread with less relish because I added thereto the bait from the rat-trap.  The priest, almost beside himself with astonishment at finding the bread nibbled, the bait gone, and no rat in the trap, consulted his neighbours, who suggested, to his great alarm, that the thief must be a snake.

For security, I kept my precious key in my mouth—­which I could do without inconvenience, as I had been in the habit of carrying in my mouth the coins I had stolen from my former blind master.  But one night, when I was fast asleep, it was decreed by an evil destiny that the key should be placed in such a position in my mouth that my breath caused a loud whistling noise.  My master concluded that this must be the hissing of the snake; he arose and stole with a club in his hand towards the place whence the sound proceeded; then, lifting the club, he discharged with all his force a blow on my unfortunate head.  When he had fetched a light, he found me moaning, with the tell-tale key protruding from my mouth.