Free Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) by Gordon Jarvie Page A

the second wife, ‘that the person who offers a drink takes a draught out of it first.’
    Silver-tree put her mouth to it, and the second wife went and struck it so that some of it went down her throat, and she was poisoned and fell dead. They had only to carry her home a dead corpse and bury her.
    The Prince and his two wives were long alive after this, pleased and peaceful.
    I left them there.

THE MAGIC WALKING-STICK
John Buchan
    When Bill came back for mid-term that autumn half he had before him a complex programme of entertainment. Thomas, the keeper, whom he revered more than anyone else in the world, was to take him in the afternoon to try for a duck in the big marsh called Alemoor. Inthe evening Hallowe’en would be celebrated in the nursery with his small brother Peter, and he would be permitted to sit up after dinner till ten o’clock. Next day, which was Sunday, would be devoted to wandering about with Peter, hearing from him all the appetizing home news, and pouring into his greedy ears the gossip of the foreign world of school. On Monday morning, after a walk with the dogs, he was to be driven up to London, lunch with Aunt Alice, go to a conjuring show, and then, after a noble tea, return to school in time for lock-up.
    It seemed to Bill all that could be desired in the way of excitement. But he did not know just how exciting that mid-term was destined to be.
    The first shadow of a cloud appeared after luncheon, when he had changed into his hunting gear, and Peter and the dogs were waiting at the gunroom door. Bill could not find his own proper stick. It was a long hazel staff, given him by the second stalker in a Scottish deer-forest the year before – a staff rather taller than Bill, of glossy hazel, with a shapely polished crook, and without a ferrule, like all stalking-sticks. He hunted for it high and low, but it could not be found. Without it in his hand Bill felt that an expedition lacked something vital, and he was not prepared to take instead one of his father’s shooting-sticks, as Groves, the butler, recommended. Nor would he accept a knobbly cane proffered by Peter. Feeling a little aggrieved and imperfectly equipped,he rushed out to join Thomas. He would cut himself an ash-plant in the first hedge.
    But as the two ambled down the lane which led to Alemoor, they came on an old man sitting under a hornbeam. He was a funny little wizened old man, in a shabby long green overcoat, which had once been black, and he wore on his head the oldest and tallest and greenest bowler hat that ever graced a human head. Thomas walked on as if he did not see him, and Gyp, the spaniel, and Shawn, the Irish setter, at the sight of him dropped their tails between their legs, and remembered an engagement a long way off. But Bill stopped, for he saw that the old man had a bundle under his arm, a bundle of ancient umbrellas and queer ragged sticks.
    The old man smiled at him, and he had very bright eyes. He seemed to know what was wanted, for he at once took from his bundle a stick. You would not have said that it was the kind of stick Bill was looking for. It was short, and heavy, and made of some dark foreign wood, and instead of a crook it had a handle shaped like a crescent, cut out of some white substance which was neither bone nor ivory. Yet Bill, as soon as he saw it, felt that it was the one stick in the world for him.
    ‘How much?’ he asked.
    ‘One penny,’ said the old man, and his voice squeaked like a winter wind in a chimney.
    Now a penny is not a common price for anything nowadays, but Bill happened to have one – a gift from Peter on his arrival that day, along with a brass cannon, five empty cartridges, a broken microscope, and a badly printed, brightly illustrated narrative called Two Villains Foiled . But a penny sounded too little, so Bill proffered one of his rare pounds.
    ‘I said one penny,’ said the old man rather snappily.
    The small coin changed hands, and the little old wizened face