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wouldn't offer any opinion until I'd heard the whole story. Because I am not, I will admit that it interested me. The bit about the trial particularly. It reminded me of a similar case I once heard of, in which a certain woman claimed that a servant girl was her daughter, although the girl herself denied it. Now let us hear the rest."
    "As you wish. All this was two years ago, when I was, just as Salica says, much younger. Last year I had a chance to go back to Soldo. I jumped at it as you can imagine, and as soon as I got there I set out to find what had become of Bricco.
    "It took me two days to locate the hovel in which the family lived, and as you can imagine I wasn't in the least anxious to be confronted by his mother. I talked to some of the neighborhood children instead and described Bricco to them, saying that he had been the youngest child in the house. Would any of you care to guess what they told me?"
    I shook my head; so did Inclito.
    "They said that the Vanished People had taken him. That a highborn woman of the Vanished People had taken a fancy to him and stolen him away. That once in a rare while they would see him still, thin and pale and looking as though he was very unhappy. But he would soon vanish like a ghost."
    Inclito's mother sighed. "Honestly now, Fava. Is that a true story? You didn't make it up?"
    "I don't say that he really appeared to those children," Fava protested. "I said that was what they said. And it was."
    Inclito himself grunted, "Sprats tell all sorts of wild tales. Your turn, Mora. Let's hear what you can do."
    Mora's History: The Giant's Daughter
    T his will be the shortest story told tonight, and the simplest. It will also be the best, though I don't hope to win, or even wish to. Fava will win, as she usually does, and as she should. I wouldn't have it otherwise.
    Once when the whorl was young, which was not very long ago at all, there was a certain snug and quiet town that was different from the others around it only in that it belonged to the best of giants. This giant lived in a big white castle outside the town he owned, and seldom troubled the townsfolk. The truth is that though he was very large and very strong, and rather homely, he was so kind and generous and wise and good and brave that the townsfolk could not have asked for a better owner. Nor could they have governed themselves half so well as he governed them.
    You would have thought that they would be happy with this arrangement, and to give them their due most of them were. But many others were not.
    "What right has he got to be bigger than we are?" they asked each other.
    "What right has he got to make us look like fools by his wisdom?"
    "What right has he got to be richer?" they said.
    And, "He's so cheerful he makes me sick. What right has he got to smile and whistle when things are at their worst?"
    "If I were as rich as he is, I'd be cheerful, too, and brave," they told each other when he couldn't hear them, and never considered that the giant had been wise and cheerful and brave when he had nothing but his daughter.
    This daughter was large and strong just as he was, which meant that she was much too big to be pretty. She was also, I'm sorry to say, much too young to be wise. She went to the academy in the town with the town girls, but she stood out among them like a cow in a hen-yard. The town girls made fun of her, until one day she knocked down half her class. After that there were two parties at the academy, just as you often see in the corpo. In one was the giant's daughter. In the other was everyone else in the academy, even the teachers.
    That went on for a year, until a new girl came, a new girl who was prettier than the prettiest girl in the whole academy and smarter than the smartest. Everyone in the whole place wanted to be her best friend. How surprised they were when she chose the giant's daughter! And how angry!
    After that there were still two parties in the academy, and the second was still much,