"No, no, Peter. You will find yourself in many an awkward fix yet, when you will be glad that you have still another wish left you. For the present, take yourself homewards. Here are two thousand guilders," continued the little forest gnome, drawing a little purse from his pocket. "Be satisfied with them; for if you come here again asking for money, I shall have to hang you to the tallest of yonder pine-trees. Such has been my custom ever since I came to live in this forest. Old Winkfritz, who owned that large glass-factory in the lower part of the forest, died three days ago. Go thither early to-morrow morning, and make a bid for the property. Behave yourself, be industrious, and I will visit you from time to time, to be at hand with advice and help, seeing that you did not wish for common-sense. But--and I am now speaking in all seriousness--your first wish was a bad one. Have a care of becoming too fond of the tavern, Peter! it is a place which brings good to nobody in the long run!" While speaking, the little man had pulled out another pipe of the finest flint-glass, and after filling it with dried pine-needles, had thrust it into his little, toothless mouth. He then produced a huge burning-glass, stepped into the sunlight and lit his pipe. This business over, he turned to Peter, and shook hands with him in the most friendly manner, gave him a few more words of advice, puffed away at his pipe even more vigorously until he disappeared in a cloud of smoke which gave forth an aroma of the finest Dutch tobacco as it curled slowly upwards among the pine branches overhead. On arriving home, Peter found his mother in great trouble about him, for the good lady had come to the conclusion that her son must have enlisted as a soldier. But with great glee he bade her be of good cheer, telling her how he had fallen in with a good friend in the forest, who had advanced him money so that he could set himself up in a business other than charcoal-burning. Although his mother had been living for a good thirty years in the charcoal-burner's hut, and had grown as accustomed to the sight of grimy faces as a miller's wife to the flour-covered features of her husband, yet she was vain enough to despise her former station from the very moment in which Peter showed her the means to a more ostentatious way of life. "Ah!" she said, "as the mother of the owner of a glass factory, my position is very different from that of my neighbours, Greta and Beta; in future I shall occupy a more prominent place in church, in a pew where the better class people sit."