Another tale relates how the boors of Schilda contrived to get their millstone twice down from a high mountain: 

The boors of Schilda had built a mill, and with extraordinary labour they had quarried a millstone for it out of a quarry which lay on the summit of a high mountain; and when the stone was finished, they carried it with great labour and pain down the hill.  When they had got to the bottom, it occurred to one of them that they might have spared themselves the trouble of carrying it down by letting it roll down.  “Verily,” said he, “we are the stupidest of fools to take these extraordinary pains to do that which we might have done with so little trouble.  We will carry it up, and then let it roll down the hill by itself, as we did before with the tree which we felled for the council-house.”

This advice pleased them all, and with greater labour they carried the stone to the top of the mountain again, and were about to roll it down, when one of them said, “But how shall we know where it runs to?  Who will be able to tell us aught about it?” “Why,” said the bailiff, who had advised the stone being carried up again, “this is very easily managed.  One of us must stick in the hole [for the millstone, of course, had a hole in the middle], and run down with it.”  This was agreed to, and one of them, having been chosen for the purpose, thrust his head through the hole, and ran down the hill with the millstone.  Now at the bottom of the mountain was a deep fish-pond, into which the stone rolled, and the simpleton with it, so that the Schildburgers lost both stone and man, and not one among them knew what had become of them.  And they felt sorely angered against their old companion who had run down the hill with the stone, for they considered that he had carried it off for the purpose of disposing of it.  So they published a notice in all the neighbouring boroughs, towns, and villages, calling on them, that “if any one come there with a millstone round his neck, they should treat him as one who had stolen the common goods, and give him to justice.”  But the poor fellow lay in the pond, dead.  Had he been able to speak, he would have been willing to tell them not to worry themselves on his account, for he would give them their own again.  But his load pressed so heavily upon him, and he was so deep in the water, that he, after drinking water enough—­more, indeed, than was good for him—­died; and he is dead at the present day, and dead he will, shall, and must remain!

The forty-seventh chapter recounts “How the Schildburgers purchased a mouser, and with it their own ruin”: