water-dogs wandered about in the swamp--splash! splash! The rushes
and reeds bent beneath their tread on all sides. It was terribly
alarming to the poor duckling. He twisted his head round to get it
under his wing, and just at that moment a frightful big dog appeared
close beside him; his tongue hung right out of his mouth and his eyes
glared wickedly. He opened his great chasm of a mouth close to the
duckling, showed his sharp teeth, and--splash!--went on without
touching him.

"Oh, thank Heaven!" sighed the duckling, "I am so ugly that even the
dog won't bite me!"

Then he lay quite still while the shot whistled among the bushes, and
bang after bang rent the air. It only became quiet late in the day,
but even then the poor duckling did not dare to get up; he waited
several hours more before he looked about, and then he hurried away
from the marsh as fast as he could. He ran across fields and meadows,
and there was such a wind that he had hard work to make his way.

Towards night he reached a poor little cottage; it was such a
miserable hovel that it could not make up its mind which way to fall
even, and so it remained standing. The wind whistled so fiercely round
the duckling that he had to sit on his tail to resist it, and it blew
harder and harder; then he saw that the door had fallen off one hinge
and hung so crookedly that he could creep into the house through the
crack, and by this means he made his way into the room. An old woman
lived there with her cat and her hen. The cat, which she called
"Sonnie," could arch his back, purr, and give off electric
sparks--that is to say, if you stroked his fur the wrong way. The hen
had quite tiny short legs, and so she was called "Chuckie-low-legs."
She laid good eggs, and the old woman was as fond of her as if she had
been her own child.

In the morning the strange duckling was discovered immediately, and
the cat began to purr and the hen to cluck.

"What on earth is that!" said the old woman, looking round; but her
sight was not good, and she thought the duckling was a fat duck which
had escaped. "This is a capital find," said she; "now I shall have
duck's eggs if only it is not a drake. We must find out about that!"

So she took the duckling on trial for three weeks, but no eggs made
their appearance. The cat was the master of the house and the hen the
mistress, and they always spoke of "we and the world," for they
thought that they represented the half of the worl