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THE A.B.C. BOOK 597
' There it ended ! but it is not done with ! now it is to be printed ! and then it is to be read ** it is to be offered instead of the worthy old letter-verses in my book ! What says the meeting, learned and unlearned, single and collected works ? What says the book-case ? I have spoken —now the others can act ! '
And the books stood and the book-case stood, but the cock flew down again into his capital A, and looked about him proudly. ' I talked well, I crowed well !—that the new A.B.C. book cannot do after me ! it will certainly die ! it is dead already ! it has no cock ! ' |
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THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER
The storks tell their little ones very many stories, all of the swamp and the marsh. These stories are generally adapted to the age and capacity of the hearers. The 3roungest are content if they are told ' Cribble-crabble, plurry-murry ' as a story, and find it charming ; but the older ones want something with a deeper meaning, or at any rate something relating to the family. Of the two oldest and longest stories that have been preserved among the storks we all know the one, namely, that of Moses, who was exposed by his mother on the banks of the Nile, and whom the King's daughter found, and who afterwards became a great man and the place of whose burial is unknown. That story is very well known.
The second is not known yet, perhaps because it is quite an inland story. It has been handed down from stork-mamma to stork-mamma, for thousands of years, and each of them has told it better and better ; and now we'll tell it best of all.
The first Stork pair who told the story had their summer residence on the wooden house of the Viking, which lay by the wild moor in Wendsyssel: that is to say, if we are to speak out of the abundance of our knowledge, hard by the great moor in the circle of Hjorring, high up by Skagen, the most northern point of Jutland. The wilderness there |
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