'I dare say!' said the Princess; 'but you haven't so much milk as we,
I'll be bound; for we milk our kine into great pails, and carry them
in-doors, and empty them into great tubs, and so we make great, great
cheeses.'

'Oh! you do, do you?' said Boots. 'Well, we milk ours into great
tubs, and then we put them in carts and drive them in-doors, and then
we turn them out into great brewing vats, and so we make cheeses as
big as a great house. We had, too a dun mare to tread the cheese well
together when it was making; but once she tumbled down into the
cheese, and we lost her; and after we had eaten at this cheese seven
years, we came upon a great dun mare, alive and kicking. Well, once
after that I was going to drive this mare to the mill, and her back-
bone snapped in two; but I wasn't put out, not I, for I took a spruce
sapling, and put it into her for a back-bone, and she had no other
back-bone all the while we had her. But the sapling grew up into such
a tall tree, that I climbed right up to heaven by it, and when I got
there, I saw the Virgin Mary sitting and spinning the foam of the sea
into pig's-bristle ropes; but just then the spruce-fir broke short
off, and I couldn't get down again; so the Virgin Mary let me down by
one of the ropes, and down I slipped straight into a fox's hole, and
who should sit there but my mother and your father cobbling shoes;
and just as I stepped in, my mother gave your father such a box on
the ear, that it made his whiskers curl.'

'That's a story!' said the Princess; 'my father never did any such
thing in all his born days!'

So Boots got the Princess to wife, and half the kingdom besides.