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Updated: May 23, 2025
And she became an ugly old hag, and went away to the deep woods, shrieking as she went. "And did she ever come back again?" asked Ivan. "No, she never came back again," said old Peter. "Once was enough." "And what happened to Vanoushka when he grew up?" "He grew up as handsome as Alenoushka was pretty. And he became a great hunter. And he married the sister of the fine gentleman.
He followed her, leaping about, and tossing his little white tail. The old witch was waiting for her. She sprang out of the bushes by the riverside, and seized Alenoushka, and tore off her pretty white dress, and fastened a heavy stone about her neck, and threw her from the bank into a deep place, so that she sank to the bottom of the river.
A little lamb, said old Peter, a little lamb who ran round and round Alenoushka, frisking and leaping, with its little tail tossing in the air. Alenoushka looked round for her brother, but could not see him. But there was the little lamb, leaping round her, trying to lick her face, and there in the ground was the print left by the sheep's foot.
"Perhaps I shall be better to-morrow," says Alenoushka. Well, the next day the gentleman rode into the fields, and the old hag came again while he was out. "Would you like me to cure you?" says she. "I know a way to make you as well as ever you were. Plump you will be, and pretty again, before your husband comes riding home." "And what must I do?" says Alenoushka, crying to think herself so ugly.
And it was full of water, like a little well. "Sister, sister," says he, "the horse has made a little well for me with his great hoof, and now we can have a drink; and oh, but I am thirsty!" "Not yet, brother," says Alenoushka. "If you drink from the hoofmark of a horse, you will turn into a little foal, and that would never do."
"I am so very thirsty," says Vanoushka; but he did as his sister told him, and they walked on together under the burning sun. A little farther on Vanoushka saw the hoofmark of a cow, and there was water in it glittering in the sun. "Sister, sister," says Vanoushka, "the cow has made a little well for me, and now I can have a drink." "Not yet, brother," says Alenoushka.
"You must go to the river and bathe this afternoon," says the old witch. "I will be there and put a spell on the water. Secretly you must go, for if any one knows whither you have gone my spell will not work." So Alenoushka wrapped a shawl about her head, and slipped out of the house and went to the river. Only the little lamb, Vanoushka, knew where she had gone.
And the little lamb lived in the house, and never grew any bigger, but always frisked and played, and followed Alenoushka wherever she went. And then one day, when the fine gentleman had ridden far away to the town to buy a new bracelet for Alenoushka, there came an old witch. Ugly she was, with only one tooth in her head, and wicked as ever went about the world doing evil to decent folk.
The fine gentleman came riding home in the evening, and he rejoiced when he saw his dear Alenoushka well again, with plump pink cheeks, and a smile on her rosy lips. But the little lamb knew everything.
She watched where he went, and when she knew she began to hate the lamb; and she gave orders for the sticks to be cut, and the iron cauldron to be heated, and the steel knives made sharp. She sent a servant to catch the lamb; and she said to the fine gentleman, who thought all the time that she was Alenoushka, "It is time for the lamb to be killed, and made into a tasty stew."
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