go down a while and see what we make of that."

It was a crooked, zigzag road that he had to travel, and rough
and hard into the bargain. His one eye tingled and smarted, and
his knees and elbows were rubbed to the quick; nevertheless One-
eyed Hans had been in worse trouble than this in his life.

Down he went and down he went, further than he had climbed
upward before. "Sure, I must be near some place or other," he
thought.

As though in instant answer to his thoughts, he heard the sudden
sound of a voice so close beneath him that he stopped short in
his downward climbing and stood as still as a mouse, with his
heart in his mouth. A few inches more and he would have been
discovered; - what would have happened then would have been no
hard matter to foretell.

Hans braced his back against one side of the chimney, his feet
against the other and then, leaning forward, looked down between
his knees. The gray light of the coming evening glimmered in a
wide stone fireplace just below him. Within the fireplace two
people were moving about upon the broad hearth, a great, fat
woman and a shock-headed boy. The woman held a spit with two
newly trussed fowls upon it, so that One-eyed Hans knew that she
must be the cook.

"Thou ugly toad," said the woman to the boy, "did I not bid thee
make a fire an hour ago? and now, here there is not so much as a
spark to roast the fowls withall, and they to be basted for the