Читать книгу The Marvellous Adventures and Rare Conceits of Master Tyll Owlglass - Robert Henderson Mackenzie Kenneth - Страница 10

How Owlglass with other children, was forced to eat fat soup, and gat blows likewise

There was in the village where Owlglass lived with his mother, a custom that when anyone killed a pig, the neighbour’s children came to him in his house to eat a soup or broth, which was called the butcher-broth. Now there lived in this village a farmer who was avaricious, and yet he dared not to refuse the children the soup; then thought he of a cunning way by which he might make them sick of the soup-eating; and he cut into it the sour crumb of the bread.

When the boys and girls came, Owlglass also was among them, and he let them come in, and closed the doors and poured out the soup, and the broth was more than the children could eat; when one of them was full and was going away, the farmer had a rod with the which he struck him, so that each child was forced to eat more than it wished. The host knew well of the knavery of Owlglass, and therefore when that he was beating another child he always bestowed some hearty strokes upon him. And this did he for so long, as that they had ended all the eating, and that they felt like the dogs after grass-grazing. Thereafter would no one go unto the stingy farmer’s house to eat the butcher-broth.