. Meanwhile you just eat
and sleep, and don't worry yourself about anything.'

Jegu declared that nothing could be easier, and then taking off his hat,
he thanked the dwarf heartily, and led his horses back to the farm.

Next morning was a holiday, and Barbaik was awake earlier than usual, as
she wished to get through her work as soon as possible, and be ready to
start for a dance which was to be held some distance off. She went
first to the cow-house, which it was her duty to keep clean, but to her
amazement she found fresh straw put down, the racks filled with hay, the
cows milked, and the pails standing neatly in a row.

'Of course, Jegu must have done this in the hope of my giving him a
dance,' she thought to herself, and when she met him outside the door
she stopped and thanked him for his help. To be sure, Jegu only replied
roughly that he didn't know what she was talking about, but this answer
made her feel all the more certain that it was he and nobody else.

The same thing took place every day, and never had the cow-house been so
clean nor the cows so fat. Morning and evening Barbaik found her earthen
pots full of milk and a pound of butter freshly churned, ornamented
with leaves. At the end of a few weeks she grew so used to this state of
affairs that she only got up just in time to prepare breakfast.

Soon even this grew to be unnecessary, for a day arrived when, coming
downstairs, she discovered that the house was swept, the furniture
polished, the fire lit, and the food ready, so that she had nothing to
do except to ring the great bell which summoned the labourers from the
fields to come and eat it. This, also, she thought was the work of Jegu,
and she could not help feeling that a husband of this sort would be very
useful to a girl who liked to lie in bed and to amuse herself.

Indeed, Barbaik had only to express a wish for it to be satisfied. If
the wind was cold or the sun was hot and she was afraid to go out lest
her complexion should be spoilt, she need only to run down to the spring
close by and say softly, 'I should like my churns to be full, and my
wet linen to be stretched on the hedge to dry,' and she need never give
another thought to the matter.

If she found the rye bread too hard to bake, or the oven taking too long
to heat, she just murmured, 'I should like to see my six loaves on the
shelf above the bread box,' and two hours after there they were.

If she was too lazy to walk all the