The Flail from Heaven

Once upon a time a farmer went out with a pair of oxen to plow. When he came to the field, the horns of the two oxen began to grow, and when he wanted to go home, they were so big that he could not enter the gate. Luckily, a butcher came along and he left them with him, and they made a deal so that he would bring the butcher a measure of turnip seed, and he would then pay him one Brabant Thaler for each grain. I call that a good sale! The farmer went home and carried the measure of turnip seed on his back, but on the way he lost a grain from his sack. The butcher paid him as he had traded; if the farmer had not lost the grain, he would have had one Brabant Thaler more. However, when he returned, the grain had grown into a tree that reached up to the sky. Then the farmer thought, "Since the opportunity is there, you must see what the angels are doing up there, and look under their eyes. So he climbed up and saw that the angels were threshing oats above and watched them; as he looked, he noticed that the tree on which he was standing began to shake, looked down and saw that someone was about to knock him down. "If you fell down there, that would be a bad thing," he thought, and in the emergency he knew no better way to help himself than to take the chaff from the oats, which lay in heaps there, and twist a rope from it: he also grabbed a hoe and a flail, which lay around in the sky, and let himself down on the rope. But he came down to a deep hole in the ground, and it was quite fortunate that he had the hoe, for he chopped his way up a stairway with it, climbed to the top, and brought the flail with him as a landmark, so that no one could doubt his tale.