here, suddenly, something happened, she never knew what, but she was
sitting on the wall of the well in her stepmother's yard. Then she got
up and entered the house.

The woman and her daughter stared as if they had been turned into stone;
but at length the stepmother gasped out:

'So you are alive after all! Well, luck was ever against me! And where
have you been this year past?' Then the girl told how she had taken
service in the under-world, and, beside her wages, had brought home with
her a little casket, which she would like to set up in her room.

'Give me the money, and take the ugly little box off to the outhouse,'
cried the woman, beside herself with rage, and the girl, quite
frightened at her violence, hastened away, with her precious box clasped
to her bosom.

The outhouse was in a very dirty state, as no one had been near it
since the girl had fallen down the well; but she scrubbed and swept till
everything was clean again, and then she placed the little casket on a
small shelf in the corner.

'Now I may open it,' she said to herself; and unlocking it with the key
which hung to its handle, she raised the lid, but started back as she
did so, almost blinded by the light that burst upon her. No one would
ever have guessed that that little black box could have held such a
quantity of beautiful things! Rings, crowns, girdles, necklaces--all
made of wonderful stones; and they shone with such brilliance that
not only the stepmother and her daughter but all the people round came
running to see if the house was on fire. Of course the woman felt quite
ill with greed and envy, and she would have certainly taken all the
jewels for herself had she not feared the wrath of the neighbours, who
loved her stepdaughter as much as they hated her.

But if she could not steal the casket and its contents for herself, at
least she could get another like it, and perhaps a still richer one.
So she bade her own daughter sit on the edge of the well, and threw her
into the water, exactly as she had done to the other girl; and, exactly
as before, the flowery meadow lay at the bottom.

Every inch of the way she trod the path which her stepsister had
trodden, and saw the things which she had seen; but there the likeness
ended. When the fence prayed her to do it no harm, she laughed rudely,
and tore up some of the stakes so that she might get over the more
easily; when the oven offered her bread, she scattered the loaves onto
the gr