On the outskirts of the Silenai village there was a small hut where a lodger lived with his wife. They had a nine-year-old daughter.  At the height of the harvesting season, a Polish gentleman from the same village of Silenai came to hire the lodger to reap his rye, but he found only the little girl at home. He asked her where her father and mother were. She answered that she didn’t know. At that moment, the village herd was passing by.
"Do you know, master, which cow gives the most milk?" asked the girl.
The gentleman said, "How should 1 know?"
"This one." The girl snatched a pail and placed it under a towel.
She pulled once and milk ran into the pail until it was half-full.
The gentleman asked, "Why don’t you milk out the whole of it?" "Because my mother never milks out the whole of it. She says that if she took all the milk, that cow couldn’t bear it."
"I’ll give you money, you just milk out the whole of it."
"I’m afraid my mother will give me a thrashing and the cow will die."
That gentleman gave her twenty kopeks, and she gave another pull into the pail - the pail filled up, but the cow breathed her last in the gate-way after coming home.
As the gentleman was walking home, he heard somebody weeping in his neighbor’s house. He inquired about the cow’s death and about what caused it. But the herdsman insisted that she had been well the whole day, that she had eaten and drunk as usual. It was only now that something had happened-she had fallen down and that was the end of it. Knowing whose fault it was, the Polish gentleman produced thirty rubles, paid for the grain, and told them not to cry.
In the evening, when the entire household had gathered in the lodger’s hut, he tied up the door and set fire to it. Not a single person walked out-all of them burned to death and had no a need to use milk from other people’ cows any more.

(Recorded in 1910)