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Siegfrid and Handa.

don’t want him here. We have Ralph to make our boots and shoes, and he does quite well for us.” So no customers came to the old man that day, and when night came he quietly packed up his wares and took his stall to pieces, and went his way. But the first thing next morning there he was again putting up his stall and covering it with boots and shoes. Every day for many weeks he came and sat by the roadside, in exactly the same spot, singing the same rhyme, and still no one went near him to buy his goods, and the children grew so used to him that they no longer stopped to stare at him.

But one day a young girl named Lisbeth, the daughter of the baker, came near the stall, and looked at a pair of red shoes, with pretty buckles, and the old man looked at her, but did not say a word. Then she turned away, but she felt the money in her pocket as she walked, and she looked back at the shoes, and the old man nodded and chuckled to himself as he watched her. Next morning she came again, but this time she took up the shoes in her hand, and examined them well; she turned them about a little, and then she put them down and walked away as before; but in the

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