n the bottom so that some part of whatever was measured might
stick to it. And so it did, for when the measure came back, three new
silver threepenny bits were sticking to it.

"What's this!" said Great Claus, and he ran off at once to Little Claus.
"Where on earth did you get all this money?" he asked.

"Oh, that's for my horse's skin. I sold it yesterday morning."

"That was well paid for, indeed," said Great Claus. He ran home, took an
ax, and hit all his four horses on the head; then he flayed them and
carried their skins off to the town.

"Hides! hides! who'll buy my hides?" he cried through the streets.

All the shoemakers and tanners in the town came running up and asked him
how much he wanted for his hides.

"A bushel of money for each," said Great Claus.

"Are you mad?" they all said. "Do you think we have money by the
bushel?"

"Skins! skins! who'll buy them?" he shouted again, and the shoemakers
took up their straps, and the tanners their leather aprons, and began to
beat Great Claus.

"Hides! hides!" they called after him. "Yes, we'll hide you and tan you.
Out of the town with him," they shouted. And Great Claus made the best
haste he could to get out of the town, for he had never yet been
thrashed as he was being thrashed now.

"Little Claus shall pay for this," he said, when he got home. "I'll kill
him for it."

Little Claus's old grandmother had just died in his house. She had often
been harsh and unkind to him, but now that she was dead he felt quite
grieved. He took the dead woman and laid her in his warm bed to see if
she would not come to life again. He himself intended to sit in a corner
all night. He had slept that way before.

As he sat there in the night, the door opened and in came Great Claus
with his ax. He knew where Little Claus's bed stood, and he went
straight to it and hit the dead grandmother a blow on the forehead,
thinking it was Little Claus.

"Just see if you'll make a fool of me again," said he, and then he went
home.

"What a bad, wicked man he is!" said Little Claus. "He was going to kill
me. What a good thing that poor grandmother was dead already! He would
have taken her life."

He now dressed his grandmother in her best Sunday clothes, borrowed a
horse of his neighbor, harnessed it to a cart, and set his grandmother
on the back seat, so that she could not fall when the cart moved. Then
he started off through the woods. When the sun rose, he was just outside
a