Once a rich man went to a distant village to go to the market. He lingered there and remembered that his godfather lived in this village. “At an inn you have to pay for lodging and buy hay for the horse,” he thinks.
And I went to see my godfather.
The godfather and his wife received the guest cordially and treated him to glory.
The next day there was such a snowstorm that you couldn’t see the light.
The owner and his wife began to persuade the guest:
- Wait a while, dear kumanek, stay until the bad weather passes!
The blizzard blows one day, two and three.
The rich man thinks: “If only such bad weather had happened at the inn, how much money would have been lost, but here the horse is warm and in the hall. Is it bad?
On the fourth day the snowstorm subsided, and the guest harnessed his horse. He began to say goodbye to the owners:
- Thank you for the bread and salt, for the treat! In a week my wife will celebrate her birthday. Come visit us!
A week later, the invited guests arrived on the appointed day. The rich man ran out into the yard to greet the guests, and the visiting godfather, glancing out the window, managed to notice how the hostess hastily cleared the treat from the table: she put a bottle of honey beer on the stove and covered it with a towel, put a plate of pancakes in the stove, hid a quarter of the vodka on the bed and covered it with a feather bed, and stuffed the boiled lamb head on a platter under the stove. She hid everything and opened the door, greeting the guests with a bow:
- Thank you for not disdaining, I have arrived, welcome guests! Unfortunately for me, I got sick and didn’t have time to deal with anything, don’t blame me if something’s wrong. I somehow cooked some Lenten cabbage soup and baked some bread. We won't leave you hungry!
“What a misfortune it turned out to be,” the owner assents, “is this how we should have received you, dear kumanek, if not for this misfortune!”
And the visiting godfather undresses and says:
“It’s all nothing, as long as the hostess gets better soon.” But we have suffered through a lot of fear - we will never forget it.
- What happened to you? - the owners asked.
“But when we were driving here,” the guest began to tell, “my wife and I saw a terrible snake!” It lay next to the road and hissed like your mead on the stove! And the snake’s eyes burned and sparkled, like your quarter with vodka under a feather bed! I grabbed a huge stone - no smaller than the lamb's head under your stove - and hit the snake on the head so hard that it flattened out, like the pancakes you have in your stove!
The stingy owners had nothing to do; they had to put all the food on the table.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru