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When the girl was brought to the king, he led her into a room that was entirely filled with straw. Giving her a spinning wheel, he said, “Get to work now. If by morning you have not spun this straw into gold, then you will have to go and live in the tower.” Then he locked the room, and she was there all alone.
The poor miller’s daughter sat there. She had no idea how to spin straw into gold. She began to cry.
Then suddenly the door opened. A little man stepped inside and said, “Good evening, why are you crying so?”
“Oh,” answered the girl, “I am supposed to spin straw into gold, and I do not know how to do it.”
The little man said, “What will you give me if I spin it for you?”
“My necklace,” said the girl.
The little man took the necklace, sat down before the spinning wheel, and whir, whir, whir, three times pulled, and the spool was full. So it went until morning, and then all the straw was spun, and all the spools were filled with gold, and the little man had vanished.
This quiz no longer existsFive cents doesn’t buy you much these days, but the 1913 Liberty Head nickel is worth a fortune. Just ask the family of George Walton.
A month after Paul Montgomery, a coin collector in New Hampshire, offered a one million dollar reward for the 1913 Liberty Head nickel—one of the rarest American coins—the Walton family came forward and said that they thought they owned one.
The family had put the coin away after Walton’s death in 1962, believing the nickel was worthless. But after learning of the offer, the family decided to see if their nickel was genuine. Experts determined it was.
The story of the Liberty Head nickel began in 1883. That’s when the U.S. Mint began producing the coins. In 1912, the mint replaced the Liberty Head nickel with the Indian Head, or Buffalo, nickel. But in 1913, someone—probably an employee of the U.S.Mint—illegally minted five additional Liberty Head coins.
Two of the rare 1913 nickels are now owned by coin collectors,and two others are in a museum. What happened to the fifth one remained a mystery until now.
“It’s been missing for so long,” said coin dealer John Dannreuther. “People would say there are only four, but we knew there were five. And there it is.”
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