The Juniper Tree and Other Tales Read Free

“You’ve no business up here by night.”
    But the sexton just stood there perfectly still, to make the boy think he was a ghost.
    “What are you doing here?” asked the boy for the second time. “Speak up if you’re an honest fellow, or I’ll throw you down the stairs.”
    He doesn’t really mean it, thought the sexton, so he made not a sound and went on standing there as if he were carved from stone.
    So the boy asked him what he was doing for the third time, and when there was still no answer he took a run-up and pushed the ghost downstairs. It fell ten steps, landed in a corner and lay there. After that the boy rang the bell, went back to bed without a word to anyone, and fell asleep again.
    Meanwhile the sexton’s wife waited and waited for her husband, but he didn’t come home. At last, feelingalarmed, she woke the boy and asked, “Do you know where my husband is? He climbed the tower ahead of you.”
    “No, I don’t,” said the boy, “but there was someone standing on the stairs opposite the belfry window, and since he didn’t answer when I spoke to him and wouldn’t move, I thought it was some rascal up to no good and pushed him down the steps. Go and look, and if it’s your husband then I’m sorry.”
    The sexton’s wife hurried off and found her husband lying in a corner of the staircase, moaning. He had broken a leg. She carried him down the tower and went off to see the boy’s father, complaining angrily.
    “Your son has done a shocking thing,” she said. “He threw my husband down the stairs so that he broke his leg. Get that good-for-nothing out of our house!”
    The horrified father went round to the sexton’s house and scolded the boy. “What sort of trick was that? The Evil One must have put it into your head.”
    “No, Father, please listen to me,” said the boy. “I’m perfectly innocent. He was standing in the dark like someone up to no good, and since I didn’t know who he was I asked him three times to speak or go away.”
    “Oh, dear me,” said his father, “you’re nothing but bad luck! Get out of my sight. I never want to set eyes on you again.”
    “Very well, Father, anything you say. Just wait until day and I’ll set out to learn to learn what fear is. Then at least I’ll know a trade that will earn me a living.”
    “Learn what you like,” said his father, “I don’t care. Here are fifty talers. Take them, go out into the world, and don’t put me to shame by telling a soul where you come from or who your father is.”
    “Very well, Father,” said the boy. “If that’s all you want, I can easily remember it.”
    So when day dawned the boy put his fifty talers in his pocket and started out along the high road, saying to himself out loud all the time, “Oh, if only I could shudder with fear! If only I knew what fear is!”
    A man caught up with the boy and heard him talking to himself, and when they had gone a little further and a gallows came in sight, the man said to him, “Look, there’s the tree where seven men married the ropemaker’s daughter, and now they’re learning to fly. Sit down under it and wait for night, and you’ll soon learn what fear is.”
    “If that’s all there is to it, it’s easily done,” said the boy. “And if I learn what fear is so quickly then you can have my fifty talers. Come back and see me tomorrow morning.”
    So the boy went over to the gallows, sat down underneath it and waited for evening to come. It was chilly, so he lit a fire, but around midnight such a cold wind blew that in spite of the fire he couldn’t get warm. Andwhen the wind moved the hanged men in the air, and made them bump into each other, he thought: If I’m cold down by this fire, then those poor fellows dangling up there must be freezing.
    He felt so sorry for them that he put up a ladder, climbed it, untied the nooses around the hanged men’s necks one by one and brought all seven down. After that he stirred up the fire, blew on the