The Postscript: Stone soup

One of my favorite stories as a child was “Stone Soup.”

I don’t know if you know it or not. It’s an old European folktale, and there are a lot of variations, but in most of them two soldiers come into a town during a war. They ask for food, and everyone tells them they have nothing to eat. So the soldiers build a fire, and they ask an old woman if they can borrow a pot because they are going to make stone soup.

“Soup from a stone?” the old woman asks.

“Yes,” they say. “We are going to make stone soup!”

So the old woman loans them a pot, and they fill it with water, and they start cooking a sto...