The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean

In a village lived a poor old woman who had gathered a dish of beans and wanted to cook them. So she built a fire on her stove, and to make it burn faster, she lit it with a handful of straw. As she poured the beans into the pot, one of them fell unnoticed and came to rest on the floor next to a straw; soon after, a glowing coal also jumped down from the stove to the two of them. Then the straw started and spoke "dear friends, from where do you come?" The coal answered "I have sprung from the fire to good fortune, and if I had not carried it through by force, death was certain to me: I would have been burned to ashes." The bean said "I also escaped with my skin intact, but if the old woman had put me in the pot, I would have been boiled to a pulp without mercy, like my comrades." "Would I have had a better fate?" said the straw, "all my brothers have gone up in fire and smoke, sixty at a time she has seized and killed. Fortunately, I slipped through her fingers." "But what shall we do now?" spoke the coal. "I mean," replied the bean, "because we have so happily escaped death, let us keep together as good fellows and, lest another misfortune befall us here, let us emigrate together and go to a foreign land."