The Devil in the Card Players’ Inn

One evening, three men sat in the inn of Goetsenhoven playing cards. They were in the middle of their game when suddenly a strange man entered. He asked politely if he might join the game. The men agreed, thinking he was just an ordinary fellow. But soon they noticed that this stranger always won. Again and again the players lost, and their money disappeared. The stranger seemed to take their coins and bills with supernatural ease.

In their desperation, the men bent down to pick up fallen cards. In that moment, one of them saw something terrible: the strange man had no feet in shoes – he had cow hooves! The man cried out in fright. The stranger then spoke confidently: “That is not all! You cannot give me any task that I cannot fulfill.” The devil stood now exposed in his truth, but he remained stubbornly insisting that nothing could stop him.

The men challenged the devil and devised an impossible task: he must thrust his nose through an anchor hole of a wooden beam. This was of course a hole no larger than an anchor hole. Without hesitation, the devil climbed on a table and thrust his nose directly into the hole. But what he did not know: one of the card players had secretly gone outside and climbed a ladder. The moment the devil inserted his nose into the hole, the man drove an iron nail through it! “That is cross work!” cried the devil in pain. With those words, he vanished quickly in a cloud of smoke, never to return.