Prevod

Once a father was sitting at the table at midday with his wife and children, and a good friend who had come to visit was eating with them. As they sat there and the clock struck twelve, the visitor saw the door open and a very pale little child, dressed in snow-white clothes, come in. It neither looked about nor spoke a word, but went straight into the room next door. Soon afterward it came back and went out through the door just as silently. On the second and third days it came in exactly the same way. At last the visitor asked the father whose lovely child it was that went into the room every noon. ‘I have not seen it,’ he replied, ‘and I cannot imagine whose it could be.’ The next day, when it came again, the visitor pointed it out to the father, but he could not see it, nor could the mother or any of the children. Then the visitor rose, went to the door of the room, opened it a little, and looked inside. There he saw the child sitting on the floor, busily digging and scrabbling with its fingers in the cracks between the floorboards; but when it noticed the visitor, it vanished. He then told them what he had seen and described the child in detail, whereupon the mother recognized it and said, ‘Ah, that is my dear child, who died four weeks ago.’ They pried up the floorboards and found two hellers, which the mother had once given the child to give to a poor man. But the child had thought, ‘You could buy yourself a rusk with that,’ and had kept the hellers and hidden them in the cracks between the floorboards. Because of this, it had found no rest in the grave and had come every noon to search for the coins. The parents then gave the money to a poor person, and after that the child was never seen again.