童話故事:美麗的仙鶴(4/4)

While his wife weaved, the farmer sat and wondered how he had been so fortunate to have found such a woman, one so lovely, one who loved him, and one who was able to weave cloth out of nothing. He recalled how she had turned up at his door on a winter's night, and he thought about how little he knew or understood who she was, why she had come to him, or how she weaved the cloth. He lived with her. He loved her. Yet he hardly knew her. At last his curiosity overcame him. He opened the door just a crack and he peeped in. And this is what he saw. It was his wife, but not a woman. She was the crane that he had saved from the thicket. On the floor was an intricate pattern of feathers, and as she worked, she plucked yet more feathers from her own breast. The cost to her was pain and loss of her plumage, but she was ready to inflict this on herself for him. But then the bird looked up and saw him. She let out a cry and shed a single tear from her eye. She flapped her wings and flew up and away, out through the hole in the roof that served as a chimney in the cottage. And that was the last the poor farmer ever saw of the grateful crane who had become his wife, and who had plucked feathers from her own breast to keep him from poverty. He never married again, and lived to the end of his days alone.