The Wishing Table

8-10 min read
16 pages

The wishing table, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A table that lays itself, a goat that makes gold, and a sack nobody should open.

A tailor had three sons and one goat, and the goat kept them all in milk, so it mattered very much that she was properly fed.

Each son took his turn. Each evening the father asked the goat, «Have you had enough?» and each evening the goat said, «I have eaten so much I couldn't manage a leaf,» and each evening she was lying.

The tailor believed the goat and not his sons, and one by one he sent all three of them out of the house.

The eldest went to a joiner, and served his time, and when he left his master gave him a little wooden table. «Say «table, lay yourself», and see.»

He said it on the road, and the table covered itself with a cloth, and a plate, and a knife and fork, and dishes of meat as many as would stand on it. He walked home a good deal more slowly than he had walked away.

At home he called the neighbours in to show them. He set the table in the middle of the room and said the words — and nothing happened, because an innkeeper he had trusted the night before had swapped it for a table that was only a table.

The second son had gone to a miller, and his master gave him a donkey. «Say «bricklebrit».» He said it in a barn, and the donkey put its head down and gold pieces came out of its mouth onto the straw until there was no room for more.

He led it home, stopping at the same inn, and the innkeeper listened at the door and got up in the night and led that donkey out and put a donkey of his own in its place. So the second son also stood in his father's house looking foolish, with the neighbours watching.

The third son had gone to a turner. He had worked longest of all three, and when he left his master gave him a sack with a stick in it. «It looks like nothing,» said the master. «But say «stick, out of the sack», and it will beat whoever needs beating until you say «stick, into the sack». Your brothers have been at an inn. So will you be.»

His brothers had written to him about the inn. He got there in the evening, put the sack under his head, and talked at supper about the great treasure he was carrying, which was so heavy it could hardly be lifted.

In the middle of the night the innkeeper came in with a candle and a knife and began, very gently, to work at the cord of the sack.

«Stick,» said the third son from the pillow, «out of the sack.»

What followed lasted some time. The innkeeper went round the room twice and then out of the door and down the stairs, and by morning he had brought back the table and the donkey and left them in the yard, and he asked only that the young man should go away.

So all three of them came home together, and the table was set up in the middle of the room, and the donkey was brought in from the yard, and the neighbours were called in one more time.

This time the table laid itself, and the donkey filled a cloth with gold, and the tailor sat down in the middle of it all and said nothing for a while.

As for the goat, she had been turned out long before. She had crawled into a fox's hole, and the fox could not get her out, and in the end a bee flew in and stung her, and she went out of that hole and across the field and nobody in the story ever saw her again.

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Text source: Plot by the Brothers Grimm (1812), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Wishing Table

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