The fool took a couple of pails and went to fetch the water. As he scooped it up, a pike happened to get into his pail. Says the fool: "Glory to God! now I will cook this pike, and will eat it all myself; I won't give a bit of it to my sisters-in-law. I'm savage with them!" The pike says to him with a human voice: "Don't eat me, fool! if you'll put me back again into the water you shall have good luck!" Says the fool, "What sort of good luck shall I get from you?" "Why, this sort of good luck: whatever you say, that shall be done. Say, for instance, 'By the Pike's command, at my request, go home, ye pails, and be set in your places.'" As soon as the fool had said this, the pails immediately went home of their own accord and became set in their places. The sisters-in-law looked and wondered. "What sort of a fool is this!" they say. "Why, he's so knowing, you see, that his pails have come home and gone to their places of their own accord!" The fool came back and lay down on the stove. Again did his brothers' wives begin saying to him-- "What are you lying on the stove for, fool? there's no wood for the fire; go and fetch some." The fool took two axes and got into a sledge, but without harnessing a horse to it. "By the Pike's command," he says, "at my request, drive, into the forest, O sledge!" Away went the sledge at a rattling pace, as if urged on by some one. The fool had to pass by a town, and the people he met were jammed into corners by his horseless sledge in a way that was perfectly awful. They all began crying out: "Stop him! Catch him!" But they couldn't lay hands on him. The fool drove into the forest, got out of the sledge, sat down on a log, and said-- "One of you axes fell the trees, while the other cuts them up into billets." Well, the firewood was cut up and piled on the sledge. Then says the fool: "Now then, one of you axes! go and cut me a cudgel,[353] as heavy a one as I can lift." The axe went and cut him a cudgel, and the cudgel came and lay on top of the load. The fool took his seat and drove off. He drove by the town, but the townspeople had met together and had been looking out for him for ever so long. So they stopped the fool, laid hands upon him, and began pulling him about. Says the fool-- "By the Pike's command, at my request, go, O cudgel, and bestir thyself." Out jumped the cudgel, and took to thumping and smashing, and knocked over ever such a lot of people. There they lay on the ground, strewed about like so many sheaves of corn. The fool got clear of them and drove home, heaped up the wood, and then lay down on the stove. Meanwhile, the townspeople got up a petition against him, and denounced him to the King, saying: