Swiss Folk Tales Legends

The Horse-Egg

There was a simple mountain man who toiled and saved to get a horse. At last he had saved enough to buy a colt. How delightful it would be to watch the colt grow into a a steed! At last he tied up his savings in a corner of his huge handkerchief. He then took his sharpest-pointed staff and set out long before daybreak for Aigle, where there was a large fair for buyers and sellers of horses and cattle.

After a long, wearisome walk down the steep Ormond mountains, the sturdy mountain man reached the valley and entered the town of Aigle. There he started to examine every horse and foal on the market, seeking to secure the best animal he could for his money. But he found that his savings would not do to pay for the smallest colt offered for sale there, and that he would have to return home without having bought the colt he had come the long way for.

A swindler had slyly watched him for some time, and now stepped up to him. Before long he had made the mountain man tell what had happened to him and how bitterly disappointed he was.

After listening with feigned sympathy to the whole story, the swindler suggested that if the peasant could not afford buying a foal, he could rather buy a mare's egg.

A cow could hatch it and suckle the foal until until it was old enough to eat grass, he said.

The peasant was delighted to hear that, so he wanted to buy a mare's egg if such a treasure could be had.

There would be no difficulty about that, said the charlatan, and led the peasant to another part of the town. There he stopped before a cart where there lay a huge yellow gourd.

"There is a fine mare's egg," cried the charlatan to the peasant while he made a sign to his accomplice, the owner of the gourd and the cart. The mountaineer, who had never seen a gourd in his life, stared at it in awe and wonder, and after asking many questions and bargaining a lot, he wanted to buy it.

After a little while he did. To carry it home safely, he tied it up in his huge handkerchief, and hung it on the end of his stick over his shoulder.

He was elated when he set out for home and kept trolling a merry song. Climbing higher and higher, he joyfully looked forward to how surprised his wife would would be, and to the time his valuable egg would be safely hatched and a pretty foal would come out of it.

While he was walking near the edge of a precipice, he glanced from time to time down its steep sides.

They were covered with jagged rocks and stunted bushes. Suddenly the knots in the handkerchief loosened by the weight of the gourd and came undone. The startled peasant saw his precious gourd bound from rock to rock down the precipitous slope! As he stood motionless in utter despair, the gourd dashed with such force against a sharp stone that it flew into pieces that scattered far and wide.Right then a brown hare who had been hiding in a bush nearby, sprang in terror from its cover and darted down the mountain. The peasant imagined this was the desired colt and that it had been released from the shattered egg by accident, so he loudly called: "Coltie, Coltie, come here!" and wrung his hands in helpless grief when he saw the fleet brown hare disappear.

He watched for hours for it to come back, but it was in vain. At last the peasant sorrowfully went home, and spent the evening telling of his adventures to his wife.

As long as he lived, he talked of the remarkable horse that he would have had if the fleet-footed colt had not run away as soon as it was hatched from the mare's egg he had bought on the market-place at Aigle.