“What!” said the tailor, “drag bread for seven days on one’s back like a beast of burden, and not be able to look about. I shall trust in God, and not trouble myself about anything! The money I have in my pocket is as good in summer as in winter; but in hot weather bread gets dry and mouldy into the bargain. Even my coat does not go as far as it might. Besides, why should we not find the right way? Bread for two days, and that’s enough.” Each, therefore, bought his own bread. And then they tried their luck in the forest. It was as quiet there as in a church. No wind stirred, no brook murmured, no bird sang, and through the thickly-leaved branches, no sunbeam forced its way. The shoemaker spoke never a word, the heavy bread weighed down his back until the perspiration streamed down his cross and gloomy face. The tailor, however, was quite merry; he jumped about, whistled on a leaf, or sang a song, and thought to himself, “God in Heaven must be pleased to see me so happy.” This lasted two days, but on the third the forest would not come to an end, and the tailor had eaten up all his bread, so after all his heart sank down a yard deeper. In the meantime, he did not lose courage, but relied on God and on his luck. On the third day, he lay down in the evening hungry under a tree, and rose again next morning hungry still. So also passed the fourth day, and when the shoemaker seated himself on a fallen tree and devoured his dinner, the tailor was only a looker-on. If he begged for a little piece of bread the other laughed mockingly, and said, “You have always been so merry, now you can try for once what it is to be sad. The birds which sing too early in the morning, are struck by the hawk in the evening,” in short he was pitiless. But on the fifth morning, the poor tailor could no longer stand up, and was hardly able to utter one word for weakness. His cheeks were white, and his eyes red. Then the shoemaker said to him, “I will give you a bit of bread to-day, but in return for it, I will put out your right eye.” The unhappy tailor, who still wished to save his life, could not do it in any other way. He wept once more with both eyes, and then held them out. The shoemaker, who had a heart of stone, put out his right eye with a sharp knife. The tailor called to remembrance what his mother had formerly said to him when he had been eating secretly in the pantry, “Eat what one can, and suffer what one must.” When he had consumed his dearly-bought bread, he got on his legs again, forgot his misery and comforted himself with the thought that he could always see enough with one eye. But on the sixth day, hunger made itself felt again, and gnawed him almost to the heart. In the evening he fell down by a tree, and on the seventh morning he could not raise himself up for faintness, and death was close at hand.