Kintaro's Adventures & Other Japanese Children's Fav Stories. Florence Sakade

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      “Goodbye, old rolling man,” all the mice called. And then they sang another song:

      Nice man, rice man,

      Nice, fat mice man,

      Rolling, rolling, rolling—up!

      And as they sang the old man felt himself rolling right up and out of the hole.

      Once he was above ground, the old man brushed himself off and then went home, carrying the small bag of rice with him.

      When his old wife heard his story and saw the rice, she said: “Humpf! That won’t make more than two or three rice cakes.” But when she started pouring the rice out, they were surprised to discover that the bag always stayed full, no matter how much they poured out of it. It was a magic rice bag, this wonderful present that the mice had given them. After that they always had all the rice they could possibly eat. The old woman made rice cakes for herself and the old man every day— mountains of them—and they lived happily ever afterward.

      How to Fool a Cat

      Once upon a time there was a rich lord who liked to collect carvings of animals. He had many kinds, but he had no carved mouse. So he called two skilled carvers to him and said:

      “I want each of you to carve a mouse for me. I want them to be so lifelike that my cat will think they’re real mice and pounce on them. We’ll put them down together and see which mouse the cat pounces on first. To the carver of that mouse I’ll give this bag of gold.”

      So the two carvers went back to their homes and set to work. After a time they came back. One had carved a wonderful mouse out of wood. It was so well done that it looked exactly like a mouse. The other, however, had done very badly. He had used some material that flaked and looked funny; it didn’t look like a mouse at all.

      “What’s this?” asked the lord. “This wooden mouse is a marvelous piece of carving, but this other mouse—if it is indeed supposed to be a mouse—wouldn’t fool anyone, let alone a cat.”

      “Let the cat be brought in,” said the second carver. “The cat can decide which is the better mouse.”

      The lord thought this was rather silly, but he ordered the cat to be brought in. No sooner had it come into the room than it pounced upon the badly carved mouse and paid no attention at all to the one that was carved so well.

      There was nothing for the lord to do but give the gold to the unskilful carver, but as he did so he said: “Well, now that you have the gold, tell me how you did it.”

      “It was easy, my lord,” said the man. “I didn’t carve my mouse from wood. I carved it from dried fish. That’s why the cat pounced upon it so swiftly.”

      When the lord heard how the cat and everyone else had been fooled, he could not help laughing, and soon everyone in the entire court was holding his sides with laughter.

      “Well,” said the lord finally, “then I’ll have to give you two bags of gold. One to the workman who carved so well, and one to you who carved so cleverly. I’ll keep the wooden mouse, and we’ll let the cat have the other one.”

      The Princess and the Herdboy