Grimm's Household Tales

In the time when our Lord still walked on this earth, he and St. Peter stopped one evening at a smith’s house and received free lodging. Then it happened that a poor beggar, hard pressed by age and infirmity, came to this house and begged the smith for alms. St. Peter had compassion on him and said, “Lord and master, if it pleases you, cure his torments so that he may be able to earn his own bread.” The Lord said kindly, “Smith, lend me your forge and put some coals on for me, and then I will make this ailing old man young again.” The smith was quite willing, and St. Peter worked the bellows, and when the coal fire sparkled up large and high, our Lord took the little old man and pushed him into the forge, into the midst of the red-hot fire, so that he glowed like a rosebush and praised God in a loud voice. After that the Lord went to the quenching tub, put the glowing little man into it so that the water closed over him, and, after carefully cooling him, gave him his blessing. Then the little man sprang nimbly out, looking fresh, upright, healthy, and as if he were only twenty. The smith, who had watched everything closely and attentively, invited them all to supper. He, however, had an old, half-blind, bent mother-in-law, who went to the youth and asked with great earnestness whether the fire had burned him much. He answered that he had never felt more comfortable, and that he had sat in the red heat as if he had been in cool dew. The youth’s words echoed in the old woman’s ears all night long, and early next morning, when the Lord had gone on his way again and had heartily thanked the smith, the smith thought he might make his old mother-in-law young again as well, since he had watched everything so carefully and it lay within the scope of his trade. So he went to her and asked whether she, too, would like to go bounding about like a girl of eighteen. She said, “With all my heart, since the youth has come out of it so well.” So the smith made a great fire and thrust the old woman into it, and she writhed about this way and that and uttered terrible cries of murder. “Sit still! Why are you screaming and jumping about so?” he cried, and as he spoke, he worked the bellows again until all her rags were burned. The old woman cried without ceasing, and the smith thought to himself, “I do not quite have the right skill,” and he took her out and threw her into the cooling tub. Then she screamed so loudly that the smith’s wife and her daughter-in-law upstairs heard her, and they both ran downstairs and saw the old woman lying in a heap in the quenching tub, howling and screaming, with her face wrinkled and shriveled and all out of shape. At this the two women, who were both pregnant, were so terrified that that very night two boys were born who were made not like men but like apes, and they ran into the woods, and from them descended the species of apes.