[2] According to Paul Delarue's notes, the tale was collected by Achille Millien in 1889 from a man named Charles Ledoux, from Pougues-les-Eaux, Nièvre.
[2][1] A good-for-nothing boy once begged a sheepskin from butchers; it was so filthy he came to be called "Little Johnny Sheep-Dung".
One day, he met a bourgeois on a horse, who hired him on the promise of little work and feeding him; Johnny did not realize that he was the Devil.
At his home, the Devil showed him a horse (actually a prince he had transformed to that shape) and told him to beat it every morning.
When the tenth sack was dropped, they escaped the other side, and the waters closed on the Devil and drowned him.
The horse told Johnny to work as a gardener; they would set him to tend strawberries, and he should cut them at the root and lie down beside them.
The youngest princess again saw him looking handsome, the arbors grew back and held fruit by the time he woke, and the horse had become a man to his waist.
In the Catalogue of French Folktales, French scholars Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Thèneze classify the tale as type 314, "Le Petit Jardinier aux Cheveux d'Or ou Le Teigneux" ("The Golden-Haired Little Gardener, or the Scaldhead").