s
into the hot embers, began ravenously to lap up the flames. They
lapped and lapped, and the more they lapped the more the fire sank
away and died. Then with their flickering finger-tips they stirred
the hot logs and coals, burrowing after the thin tapes and swirls of
vanishing flame, and fetching them out like small blue eels still
wriggling for escape.

After each blue wisp had been gulped down, they sipped and sucked at
their fingers for any least tricklet of flavour that might be left;
and at the last seemed more famished than when they began.

'More, more, O wise Noodle, give us more!' they cried; and Noodle
threw the last of his fuel on the embers.

They breathed round it, fanning it into a great blaze that leaped and
danced up to the rafters; then they fell on, till not a fleck or a
flake of it was left. Noodle, seeing them still famished, broke up
a stool and threw that on the hearth. And again they flared it with
their breath and gobbled off the flame. When the stool was finished he
threw in the table, then the dresser, and after that the oak-chest and
the window-seat.

Still they feasted and were not fed. Noodle fetched an axe, and broke
down the door; then he wrenched up the boards from the floor, and
pulled the beams and rafters out of the ceiling; yet, even so, his
guests were not to be satisfied.

'I have nothing left,' he said, 'but the house itself; but since you
are still hungry you shall be welcome to it!'

He scattered the fire that remained upon the hearth, and threw it out
and about the room; and as he ran forth to escape, up against all
the walls and right through the roof rose a great crackling sheaf of
flame. In the midst of the fire, Noodle could see his seven guests
lying along on their bellies, slopping their hands in the heat, and
lapping up the flames with their tongues. 'Surely,' he thought, 'I
have given them enough to eat at last!'

After a while all the fire was eaten away, and only the black and
smouldering ruins were left. Day came coldly to light, and there sat
Noodle, without a home in the world, watching with considerate eye his
seven guests finishing their inordinate repast.

They all rose to their feet together, and came towards him bowing; as
they approached he felt the heat of their bodies as it had been seven
furnaces.

'Enough, O wise Noodle!' said they, 'we have had enough!' 'That,'
answered Noodle, 'is the least thing left me to wonder at. Go your
ways in peace