The Golden Goose

Of three brothers sent one at a time into the forest to cut wood, the two eldest, both selfish, refused to share their fine lunches with a hungry old man who greeted them along the way, and each was punished with an injury from his own axe before he could finish any work at all.

The youngest brother, often mocked by his family as simple and foolish, willingly shared his own modest bread and cheese with the same old man, who, grateful, directed him to a particular tree — where, cutting it down, he discovered a goose with feathers of pure gold sitting in the hollow trunk.

Traveling with the goose to an inn, he found that anyone who touched it out of greed became stuck fast to it themselves, and by morning he was dragging an entire chain of people — an innkeeper's daughters, a priest, a sexton, two farmers — all hopelessly glued together behind him. This ridiculous parade so amused a princess who had never once laughed in her life that her father, the king, granted her hand in marriage to the kind youngest brother exactly as he had long promised to whoever could make her laugh.