Читать книгу Little One-Inch & Other Japanese Children's Favorite Stories - Florence Sakade - Страница 9

Little One-Inch

There was once a kindly couple who had no children. One day they went to a shrine and prayed for a baby, saying, “Oh, please give us a child. We want a child very badly.”

On their way home from the shrine, they heard a tiny crying sound coming from a patch of grass. They looked in the grass, and there they found a tiny little baby boy, wrapped in a bright red blanket. “This child has come in answer to our prayers,” they said. So they took the little baby home with them and raised him as their son.

Now this baby was so tiny that he wasn’t as large as your thumb, and even as he grew older he stayed the same size. He was just about an inch tall, so the couple named him Little One-Inch.

One day, when he had grown older, Little One-Inch said to his mother and father, “Thank you very much for raising me so well. But now I must go out into the world and make my fortune.”