black slave-girl to spy on the frog and see what she would do. The black girl hid herself where she could watch, and went and told her mistress what she had seen and heard. Then the two Tzarevnas tried to imitate the frog. They dissolved their flour in cold water, poured the paste into cold ovens and repeated over and over again:
Bread, Bread! Be baked!
Clean, white, and soft as snow!
But the ovens remained cold and the paste would not bake.
Seeing this, in anger they gave the poor slave-girl a cruel beating, ordered more flour, made paste with hot water and heated the ovens. But the spilled paste had flowed all about and clogged the flues and made them useless, so that one had her loaf burned on one side and the other took hers out underbaked.
In the morning, when Tzarevich Ivan woke, the frog sent him to the Palace with his bread wrapped in a towel, and the brothers came also with theirs.
The Tzar cut the loaf of the eldest son and tasted it. "Such bread," he said, "might be eaten only out of misery," and he sent it to the kitchen that it might be given to the beggars. He tasted that of
