Another story of the kind, and very well preserved, is No 25 of Vuk's Volksmärchen der Serben, 'Von dem Mädchen das an Weisheit den Kaiser übertraf,' p. 157. A poor man had a wise daughter. An emperor gave him thirty eggs, and said his daughter must hatch chickens from these, or it would go hard with her. The girl perceived that the eggs had been boiled. She boiled some beans, and told her father to be ploughing along the road, and when the emperor came in sight, to sow them and cry, "God grant my boiled beans may come up!" The emperor, hearing these ejaculations, stopped, and said, "My poor fellow, how _can_ boiled beans grow?" The father answered, according to instructions, "As well as chickens can hatch from boiled eggs." Then the emperor gave the old man a bundle of linen, and bade him make of it, on pain of death, sails and everything else requisite for a ship. The girl gave her father a piece of wood, and sent him back to the emperor with the message that she would perform what he had ordered, if he would first make her a distaff, spindle, and loom out of the wood. The emperor was astonished at the girl's readiness, and gave the old man a glass, with which she was to drain the sea. The girl dispatched her father to the emperor again with a pound of tow, and asked him to stop the mouths of all the rivers that flow into the sea; then she would drain it dry. Hereupon the emperor ordered the girl herself before him, and put her the question, "What is heard furthest?" "Please your Majesty," she answered, "thunder and lies." The emperor then, clutching his beard, turned to his assembled counsellors, and said, "Guess how much my beard is worth." One said so much, another so much. But the girl said, "Nay, the emperor's beard is worth three rains in summer." The emperor took her to wife.