Reading (Notes) the Fifth: The Magic Kettle

Fire Kettle. Found on Wikimedia Commons.

The Magic Kettle
This story comes from The Crimson Fairy Book by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1903).
A man lived in a house on the top of a mountain.He heard a weird noise coming from the room behind him and there was a rusty old kettle in the corner of the room. He didn't know where the kettle came from or how it was in his house. He cleaned it and carried it into his kitchen, thinking that he was lucky because it was a good kettle and those are expressive. He needed a new kettle because his was getting old and had holes. Then the kettle began to warm on the fire and transform into a tanuki. It jumped out of the fire and ran around the room, as you would do if you woke up on a fire. The man had been very proud of his houses athletics, but the animal was now ruining it. He called to a neighbor for help and eventually they got it into a chest. They sat and discussed what to do with the creature, settling on selling it. They sent a neighborhood kid out to get the tradesman. When the tradesman go there, they went to show him the creature but the chest just held a kettle. He sold the kettle and the tradesman left with it. As he left, the kettle kept getting heavier and heavier. When he got home, he put it in the corner of the room and forgot about it. Noise from that area woke him up in the middl eo the night, but he only found the kettle. The same thing happened again but the kettle had transformed again. It jumped and played which freaked the guy out and he couldn't really  sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, there was just a kettle in the corner.He asked a friend what to do, and he told him to take it on the road a la freak show, and to make sure to ask the creature for permission and preform magic to keep it from running away when it saw people. Nightly, the kettle would transform and do a dance until they would close for the night. He became rich. He was honest and went back to the man that sold it to him and returned it with 100 gold pieces as a fee for hiring it. They all lived happily ever after.