Prevod

In a village there lived a poor old woman who had gathered enough beans for a meal and wanted to cook them. So she laid a fire on her hearth, and to make it burn all the faster, she lit it with a handful of straw. As she poured the beans into the pot, one slipped from her hand unnoticed and came to rest on the floor beside a straw. Soon afterward, a glowing coal sprang from the hearth and landed beside them. Then the straw spoke up and said, “Dear friends, where have you come from?” The coal replied, “By good fortune I escaped from the fire, and if I had not forced my way out, my death would have been certain: I should have burned to ashes.” The bean said, “I too have escaped with my skin whole, but if the old woman had put me in the pot, I should have been mercilessly boiled to mush like my companions.” “And would my fate have been any better?” said the straw. “The old woman has sent all my brothers up in fire and smoke. She seized sixty at once and put them to death. Luckily, I slipped through her fingers.” “But what are we to do now?” said the coal. “I think,” answered the bean, “that since we have been so fortunate as to escape death, we should stick together as good companions, and, so that no fresh misfortune may befall us here, set off together and make our way to a foreign land.”

The other two liked this suggestion, and they set out together. Soon, however, they came to a little brook, and as there was neither a bridge nor a footbridge, they did not know how to get across. The straw had a good idea and said, “I will lay myself across it, and then you can walk over me as though I were a bridge.” So the straw stretched from one bank to the other, and the coal, who was hotheaded by nature, stepped quite boldly onto the newly built bridge. But when it reached the middle and heard the water rushing beneath it, it grew frightened after all: it stood still and dared go no farther. The straw, meanwhile, began to burn, broke in two, and fell into the brook. The coal slipped in after it, hissed as it struck the water, and gave up the ghost. The bean, who had prudently remained on the bank, could not help laughing at what had happened. It could not stop, and laughed so hard that it burst. Now it too would have been done for, had not a travelling tailor happened, by good fortune, to be resting beside the brook. As he had a compassionate heart, he took out his needle and thread and sewed the bean together again. The bean thanked him most warmly, but since he had used black thread, all beans have had a black seam ever since.