# The Wishing Table _Brothers Grimm_ · 11 min read · ages 5-10 A tailor believes his lying goat and chases his three sons away, and each son gets a magic gift, but a greedy innkeeper steals the wishing table and the gold donkey. The youngest son’s cudgel beats the innkeeper until he gives both back, the family feasts, and a bee stings the shaved goat out of the fox’s den. --- Once upon a time there was a tailor who had three sons and just one goat. The goat fed them all with her milk, so every day one of the sons took her out to pasture. One day the eldest took her to the churchyard, where the best grass grew. In the evening he asked, “Goat, have you had enough?” The goat answered: I’m full as can be, not one leaf more for me. Baa! Baa! So he told his father she was full. But the tailor went down to the stall, stroked the goat and asked, “Goat, have you really had enough?” The goat answered: How can I be full? I only hopped over graves all day and never found one leaf on the way. Baa! Baa! “You liar!” cried the tailor, and he took his yardstick and chased his son out of the house. The next day the second son took the goat to the garden hedge, where the plants grew thick and green. In the evening he asked, “Goat, have you had enough?” The goat answered: I’m full as can be, not one leaf more for me. Baa! Baa! But when the tailor went down and asked, “Goat, have you really had enough?” the goat answered: How can I be full? I only hopped over graves all day and never found one leaf on the way. Baa! Baa! So the second son was chased out with the yardstick too. On the third day, the youngest son took the goat to the bushes, where the leaves were the tenderest. In the evening he asked, “Goat, have you had enough?” The goat answered: I’m full as can be, not one leaf more for me. Baa! Baa! But when the tailor asked, “Goat, have you really had enough?” the spiteful creature answered: How can I be full? I only hopped over graves all day and never found one leaf on the way. Baa! Baa! “Liars, every one of you!” cried the tailor, and he went after the poor boy with the yardstick until he fled the house. Now the tailor was alone with his goat. The next morning he took her out himself and let her graze all day among the greenest hedges. In the evening he asked, “Goat, have you had enough?” The goat answered: I’m full as can be, not one leaf more for me. Baa! Baa! He tied her up, and as he was leaving he said, “Well, you’re full at last!” But the goat cried: How can I be full? I only hopped over graves all day and never found one leaf on the way. Baa! Baa! The tailor stopped short. He saw that he had driven his three sons away for nothing. “You ungrateful creature!” he cried. “I’ll mark you so you’ll never show your face among honest tailors again.” He fetched his razor, lathered the goat’s head and shaved it as smooth as the palm of his hand. Then he drove her off with the whip, and she ran away in great leaps. Then the tailor sat alone and grew very sad. He longed for his sons, but no one knew where they had gone. The eldest had been apprenticed to a carpenter. When his training was done, his master gave him a little table of plain wood, nothing special to look at. But if you set it down and said, “Table, be set!” it was covered at once with a clean cloth, dishes of hot food and a big glass of red wine. He wandered cheerfully about the world, and wherever he liked, in a field or a forest, he set the table down and said, “Table, be set!” and everything he could wish for was there. At last he decided to go home, sure that his father would welcome him now. One evening he came to an inn full of guests, who invited him to share their supper. “No,” said the carpenter, “you’ll be my guests instead.” They laughed. But he set his table in the middle of the room and said, “Table, be set!” At once it was covered with food finer than anything the innkeeper could serve, and whenever a dish was emptied, a full one took its place all by itself. The innkeeper watched from a corner and thought, “I could use a cook like that.” That night, while everyone slept, he fetched an old table from his storeroom that looked just the same and swapped it for the wishing table. The carpenter left in the morning without noticing a thing. At home his father welcomed him gladly and asked what he had brought. “A wishing table, Father,” he said. “Invite all our relatives, and it will feed them all.” When the relatives had gathered, he said, “Table, be set!” But the table stayed as bare as any other. The poor young man knew then that it had been switched, and he stood there like a liar. The relatives laughed and went home hungry, and the son had to go and work for a master carpenter. The second son had been apprenticed to a miller. When his years were up, the master gave him a very special donkey. “Stand him on a cloth and say ‘Bricklebrit!’” he said, “and gold coins will come pouring out of him, front and back.” Whenever the young man needed money on his travels, he only had to say “Bricklebrit!” and gold rained down. After a while he thought, “If I bring my father a gold donkey, he’ll forget his anger.” As it happened, he stopped at the very same inn. When the innkeeper offered to tie up the donkey, the young man said, “I’ll take him to the stable myself. I need to know where he is.” The innkeeper found this odd. When supper was over, the young man took the cloth off the table and said he was going out to fetch the money for his supper. The innkeeper crept after him and peeped through a knothole in the stable door. The young man spread the cloth under the donkey and called, “Bricklebrit!” At once gold poured out of the animal, front and back, until it rained on the ground. “Well, I’ll be!” whispered the innkeeper. “A purse like that wouldn’t be bad at all.” In the night he led the gold donkey away and tied an ordinary one in its place. The next morning the young man went home with the wrong donkey. “A donkey?” said his father. “There are plenty of those here. I’d rather have had a good goat.” “But this one is special,” said his son. “When I say ‘Bricklebrit!’ he gives a whole clothful of gold. Call our relatives, and I’ll make them all rich.” “Now that I like,” said the tailor. “Then I can put away my needle for good.” When they had gathered, the miller spread out his cloth and called, “Bricklebrit!” But not a single coin fell, for not every donkey knows that trick. The poor miller saw that he had been cheated, and he begged everyone’s pardon. They went home as poor as they had come. The old man took up his needle again, and the young one found work at a mill. The youngest had been apprenticed to a woodturner, a craft that took the longest to learn. His brothers wrote to tell him how the innkeeper had robbed them on their last evening before they reached home. When his training was done, his master gave him a sack. “There’s a cudgel inside,” he said. “If anyone does you wrong, just say ‘Cudgel, out of the sack!’ and it will jump out and dance on their backs until they can’t move for a week. And it won’t stop until you say ‘Cudgel, into the sack!’” Whenever anyone came at the young man meaning harm, he said, “Cudgel, out of the sack!” and the cudgel dusted their coats for them while they were still wearing them. One evening he reached the inn where his brothers had been cheated. “You can find a wishing table or a gold donkey out in the world,” he told the guests, “but they’re nothing compared with the treasure in this sack.” The innkeeper pricked up his ears. “It must be full of jewels,” he thought. “All good things come in threes.” At bedtime the turner lay down on the bench with the sack under his head. When the innkeeper thought his guest was asleep, he crept over and tugged gently at the sack, hoping to slip another in its place. But the turner had been waiting for exactly this, and he cried, “Cudgel, out of the sack!” Out flew the cudgel and set to work on the innkeeper’s back. He howled for mercy, but the louder he howled, the harder the cudgel beat time, until he sank to the floor. “Give back the wishing table and the gold donkey,” said the turner, “or the dance starts all over again.” “I’ll give everything back!” cried the innkeeper. “Just make that goblin crawl back into its sack!” “I’ll let you off more lightly than you deserve,” said the young man. Then he called, “Cudgel, into the sack!” and let it rest. The next morning he went home with the table and the donkey. When he told his father he had brought a cudgel in a sack, the tailor said, “A cudgel! You can cut one from any tree.” “Not one like this, Father. When I say ‘Cudgel, out of the sack!’ it jumps out and dances on the back of anyone who means me harm. With it I won back everything the innkeeper stole from my brothers. Send for them both, and invite all our relatives.” The tailor gathered everyone, though he didn’t quite believe it. The turner spread a cloth on the floor, led in the donkey and said, “Now, dear brother, speak to him.” The miller said, “Bricklebrit!” and gold came pouring down onto the cloth like a cloudburst, until everyone had more than they could carry. (I can tell you wish you’d been there too!) Then the turner brought out the table and said, “Now, dear brother, you speak to it.” The carpenter had hardly said, “Table, be set!” before it was covered with the finest dishes. They feasted merrily late into the night. The tailor locked his needle and thread, his yardstick and his iron away in a cupboard, and he lived with his three sons in joy and plenty. But what became of the goat, whose fault it all had been? She was so ashamed of her bald head that she hid in a fox’s den. When the fox came home, a pair of big eyes glared at him out of the dark, and he ran away in fright. The bear met him and asked, “What’s the matter, Brother Fox? Why the long face?” “A fierce beast is sitting in my den,” said the fox, “glaring at me with fiery eyes.” “We’ll soon drive it out,” said the bear. But when he saw those fiery eyes, he ran for it too. The bee met him and said, “Bear, what a gloomy face! Where has all your cheer gone?” “You’d look gloomy too,” said the bear. “There’s a fierce beast in the fox’s den, and we can’t drive it out.” “I’m only a little creature nobody notices,” said the bee, “but I think I can help.” She flew into the den, landed on the goat’s smooth, shaved head and stung her so hard that the goat leaped up, cried “Baa! Baa!” and ran off wildly into the world. And to this very hour, nobody knows where she went. --- - Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-wishing-table - Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q467913 - Tale type: ATU 563, ATU 212, ATU 2015 (per Wikidata) - Source: Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 7. Auflage (1857) (https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Tischchen_deck_dich,_Goldesel,_und_Knüppel_aus_dem_Sack_(1857)) - Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 7. Auflage (1857) — original: author died 1859/1863 (+70 passed) - License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)