Prevod

In the days when our Lord still walked the earth, he came one evening with Saint Peter to a blacksmith’s house, where they were gladly given shelter. Now it happened that a poor beggar, sorely afflicted by age and infirmity, came to the house and asked the smith for alms. Peter took pity on him and said, “Lord and Master, if it pleases you, heal his affliction so that he may earn his own bread.” The Lord said gently, “Smith, lend me your forge and heap up the coals, and I will now make this old, ailing man young again.” The smith readily agreed, and Saint Peter worked the bellows. When the coal fire blazed up high and bright, our Lord took the little old man and pushed him into the forge, into the very heart of the red fire, where he glowed like a rosebush and praised God in a loud voice. Then the Lord went to the quenching trough and drew the glowing little man into it, so that the water closed over him. When he had cooled him gently and carefully, he gave him his blessing, and behold, the little man sprang out at once, supple, straight, and healthy, as though he were twenty years old. The smith, who had watched everything closely, invited them all to supper. Now he had an old, half-blind, hunchbacked mother-in-law, who went up to the young man and earnestly asked whether the fire had burned him badly. He replied that he had never felt better; he had sat there in the heat as though in cool dew.

What the young man had said rang in the old woman’s ears all night. Early the next morning, after the Lord had thanked the smith kindly and gone on his way, the smith thought he could make his old mother-in-law young again too, since he had watched the whole business so carefully and it was, after all, in his own line of work. So he called to her and asked whether she would like to go skipping about like a girl of eighteen. “With all my heart,” she said, since the young man had found it so pleasant. The smith built up a great blaze and thrust the old woman into it. She writhed this way and that and began to scream bloody murder. “Sit still! What are you shrieking and jumping about for? I have yet to give the bellows a proper pull.” With that he worked the bellows again until all her ragged clothes were burning. The old woman screamed without stopping, and the smith thought, “This is not going as it should.” He took her out and threw her into the quenching trough. Then she shrieked so loudly that the smith’s wife and her daughter-in-law heard her upstairs. They both ran down the stairs and saw the old woman lying in the trough, howling and wailing, all shrivelled up, her face wrinkled, creased, and hideously misshapen. The two women, who were both with child, were so terrified at the sight that the very same night they gave birth to two little creatures shaped not like human beings but like apes. They ran off into the forest, and from them the race of apes is descended.