"My good boy, you have now eaten everything that I have except this jam, and you have left this just as if you knew that it was poisoned. See how good God is to have preserved you from it. One single spoonful is enough to kill one instantly; so I warn you not to touch it unless you want to die." "Very well," answered the boy. On the next Sunday, as the woman was getting ready to go to Mass, she said to the boy, "Cook the soup and boil the meat and roast this duck; we will have a good dinner to-day. See that you have all done and ready when I come home." "Very well; it shall all be done," answered the boy. When the woman was gone he cooked the soup and boiled the meat, and then he put the duck upon the spit to roast. When he saw what a delicious brown crisp was forming all over the duck, he thought, "It can roast itself another one," and ate the crisp all off. He turned the spit and turned it, but the second brown crisp never came. When he saw this, he thought, "When the mistress comes home she will pepper me well," and he began to consider how he could escape a beating. In his desperation he remembered the jar of poison against which his mistress had warned him the day before. With a sudden resolution he went into the storeroom and devoured the whole jarful of preserved fruit and then crouched down in a corner to wait for death. Presently his mistress came home and cried out angrily, "What have you done to this duck?" She was about to belabor him well, when he cried, "Ah, leave me in peace, dear mistress! I shall die in a minute anyway, for I have eaten up all the poison!" At this the woman broke out into a laugh and could not refuse to forgive him. The duck and the preserves, however, were gone all the same. "That was a greedy boy, grandmother," said the little boy. "Am I greedy because I ate too much at sister's wedding-feast?" "That was only grandmother's little joke. It is not greedy to eat too much at a feast. Every one does," said the grandmother. A wedding-feast lasts three days, as every one in Russia knows, and during all that time there was eating and drinking going on in the little boy's house, with much singing and many games, some of them pretty loud and boisterous. The second evening, when the fun had become pretty noisy, the little boy went to his grandmother for a story. She told him about THE BASIL-PLANT Once upon a time there was a woman to whom it was revealed in a dream that she must fast one day in every week, for if she neglected to do so she would give birth to something other than human. The woman obeyed the behest, but one day she forgot to fast, and not long after she gave birth to a wonderfully beautiful and fragrant bush which in this world is called basil. The woman watched and tended the bush, and the fame of it spread through the whole world, even to a distant country, where the son of an emperor heard of it and at once set out to see it.