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“And now began such music! It sounded like thousands of glass bells, so full, so rich, that I thought the swans were singing. I fancied also that I heard the voice of the cuckoo and the blackbird, and at last the whole forest seemed to join in. I heard children’s voices, the sound of bells, and the song of birds; the most glorious melodies–and all came from the elves’ maypole, namely, my sausage-peg. I should never have believed that so much could come out of it; but that depends very much upon the hands into which it falls. I was quite touched. I wept, as a little mouse may weep, with pure pleasure.

“The night was far too short; but it is not longer up yonder at that season. In the morning dawn the breeze began to blow, the mirror of the forest lake was covered with ripples, and all the delicate veils and flags fluttered away in the air. The waving garlands of spider’s web, the hanging bridges and balustrades, and whatever else they are called, flew away as if they were nothing at all. Six elves brought me back my sausage-peg, and asked me at the same time if I had any wish that they could gratify; so I asked them if they could tell me how soup was made on a sausage-peg.

“‘How we do it?’ asked the chief of the elves, with a smile. ‘Why, you have just seen it. I fancy you hardly knew your sausage-peg again?’

“‘You only mean that as a joke,” I replied. And then I told them in so many words, why I had undertaken a journey, and what great hopes were founded on the operation at home. ‘What advantage,’ I asked, ‘can accrue to our mouse king, and to our whole powerful state, from the fact of my having witnessed all this festivity? I cannot shake it out of the sausage-peg, and say, “Look, here is the peg, now the soup will come.” That would be a dish that could only be put on the table when the guests had dined.’

And soon the wedding was held. But many of the mice said, as they were returning home, that it could not be really called soup on a sausage-peg, but rather soup on a mouse’s tail. They said that some of the stories had been very cleverly told; but the whole thing might have been different. “I should have told it so–and so–and so!”

Thus said the critics, who are always wise–after the fact.

And this story went out into the wide world, everywhere; and opinions varied concerning it, but the story remained as it was. And that’s the best in great things and in small, so also with regard to soup on a sausage-peg–not to expect any thanks for it.