His increasing knowledge, the long readings in the bookseller’s shop, which his brothers and sisters neither shared nor knew of, had given him a feeling of contempt for the one book on which they feasted from year to year; and his part, as Maerchen-Frau, had been on this occasion more remarkable for yawns than for anything else.  The effect of this failure was not confined to that day.  Whenever the book was brought out, there was the same feeling that the magic of it was gone, and very greatly were the poor children disquieted by the fact.

At last, one summer’s day, in the year of which we are writing, one of the boys was struck, as he fancied, by a brilliant idea; and as brilliant ideas on any subject are precious, he lost no time in summoning a council of his brothers and sisters in the garden.  It was a half-holiday, and they soon came trooping round the great linden tree—­where the bees were already in full possession—­and the youngest girl, who was but six years old, bore the book hugged fast in her two arms.

The boy opened the case—­as lawyers say—­by describing the loss of interest in their book since the last Feast of St. Nicholas.  “This did not,” he said, “arise from any want of love to the stories themselves, but from the fact of their knowing them so well.  Whatever ballad the Maerchen-Frau chose, every line of it was so familiar to each one of them that it seemed folly to repeat it.  In these circumstances it was evident that the greatest compliment they could pay the stories was to forget them, and he had a plan for attaining this desirable end.  Let them deny themselves now for their future pleasure; let them put away the Maerchen-Frau till next St. Nicholas’s Day, and, in the meantime, let each of them do his best to forget as much of it as he possibly could.”  The speaker ceased, and in the silence the bees above droned as if in answer, and then the children below shouted applause until the garden rang.

But now came the question, where was the Maerchen-Frau to be put? and for this the suggestive brother had also an idea.  He had found certain bricks in the thick old garden wall which were loose, and when taken out there was a hole which was quite the thing for their purpose.  Let them wrap the book carefully up, put it in the hole, and replace the bricks.  This was his proposal, and he sat down.  The bees droned above, the children shouted below, and the proposal was carried amid general satisfaction.  “So be it,” said the suggestor, in conclusion.  “It is now finally decided.  The Maerchen-Frau is to be walled up.”

And walled up she was forthwith, but not without a parting embrace from each of her judges, and possibly some slight latent faith in the suggestion of one of the party that perhaps St. Nicholas would put a new inside and new stories into her before next December.

“I don’t think I should like a new inside, though,” doubted the child before mentioned, with a shake of her tiny plaits, “or new stories either.”