Austria -- Fiction; Devil -- Fiction; Middle Ages -- Fiction
We said we wouldn’t, and he went to a puddle and came back with water
in a cup which he had made out of a leaf, and blew upon it and
threw it out, and it was a lump of ice the shape of the cup. We were
astonished and charmed, but not afraid any more; we were very glad to
be there, and asked him to go on and do some more things. And he did.
He said he would give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in
season or not. We all spoke at once:
“Orange!”
“Apple!”
“Grapes!”
“They are in your pockets,” he said, and it was true. And they were of
the best, too, and we ate them and wished we had more, though none of
us said so.
“You will find them where those came from,” he said, “and everything
else your appetites call for; and you need not name the thing you wish;
as long as I am with you, you have only to wish and find.”
And he said true. There was never anything so wonderful and so
interesting. Bread, cakes, sweets, nuts--whatever one wanted, it was
there. He ate nothing himself, but sat and chatted, and did one curious
thing after another to amuse us. He made a tiny toy squirrel out of
clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb overhead and barked down
at us. Then he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it
treed the squirrel and danced about the tree, excited and barking, and
was as alive as any dog could be. It frightened the squirrel from tree
to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in the forest.
He made birds out of clay and set them free, and they flew away,
singing.
At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.
“An angel,” he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and
clapped his hands and made it fly away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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