The duck swam toward them, and Hansel got on her back and bade his little sister sit beside him.  “No,” answered Grettel, “we should be too heavy a load for the duck:  she shall carry us across separately.”  The good bird did this, and when they were landed safely on the other side, and had gone for a while, the wood became more and more familiar to them, and at length they saw their father’s house in the distance.  Then they set off to run, and bounding into the room fell on their father’s neck.  The man had not passed a happy hour since he left them in the wood, but the woman had died.  Grettel shook out her apron so that the pearls and precious stones rolled about the room, and Hansel threw down one handful after the other out of his pocket.  Thus all their troubles were ended, and they lived happily ever afterward.

My story is done.  See! there runs a little mouse; anyone who catches it may make himself a large fur cap out of it.[1]

[1] Grimm.

SNOW-WHITE AND ROSE-RED

A poor widow once lived in a little cottage with a garden in front of it, in which grew two rose trees, one bearing white roses and the other red.  She had two children, who were just like the two rose trees; one was called Snow-white and the other Rose-red, and they were the sweetest and best children in the world, always diligent and always cheerful; but Snow-white was quieter and more gentle than Rose-red.  Rose-red loved to run about the fields and meadows, and to pick flowers and catch butterflies; but Snow-white sat at home with her mother and helped her in the household, or read aloud to her when there was no work to do.  The two children loved each other so dearly that they always walked about hand in hand whenever they went out together, and when Snow-white said, “We will never desert each other,” Rose-red answered:  “No, not as long as we live”; and the mother added:  “Whatever one gets she shall share with the other.”  They often roamed about in the woods gathering berries and no beast offered to hurt them; on the contrary, they came up to them in the most confiding manner; the little hare would eat a cabbage leaf from their hands, the deer grazed beside them, the stag would bound past them merrily, and the birds remained on the branches and sang to them with all their might.

No evil ever befell them; if they tarried late in the wood and night overtook them, they lay down together on the moss and slept till morning, and their mother knew they were quite safe, and never felt anxious about them.  Once, when they had slept all night in the wood and had been wakened by the morning sun, they perceived a beautiful child in a shining white robe sitting close to their resting-place.  The figure got up, looked at them kindly, but said nothing, and vanished into the wood.  And when they looked round about them they became aware that they had slept quite close to a precipice, over which they would certainly have fallen had they gone on a few steps further in the darkness.  And when they told their mother of their adventure, she said what they had seen must have been the angel that guards good children.