The Ice-Cream Cart

There was once a little girl and her mother who were so poor that often they could not even afford to buy bread. When the ice-cream cart passed, the little girl would watch with yearning, not greed, in her eyes, the other children licking their huge cones. The Ice-cream seller noticed this and felt so sorry for her that he gave her his entire cart as a present.

'What will happen when all the ice-cream is finished?' asked the little girl. 'This is a magic cart,' the ice-cream vendor reassured her, 'and it makes ice-cream all by itself. You only have to tell it what kind and then, when the containers are full, you must remember to say, ''Enough now''.'

From that day onwards, the little girl and her mother had as much ice-cream as they wanted. One day, however, while the little girl was away, her mother wanted something to eat. 'Chocolate and nut,' she ordered, and the cart immediately began to produce ice-cream. It made so much that floods of ice-cream began to pour out. The poor woman did not know how to make it stop. Soon the whole town was buried and, when the little girl returned, the ice-cream was already as high as the roof-tops and people coming into the town had to lick for themselves a path through it.