Foolish Men and Scolding Wives. 205 When she was ready with the spinning she took the yarn off the wheel and sat up her loom and began weaving the cloth. She then took it off her loom, pressed it and cut it out, and sewed new clothes of it for her husband ; and when they were ready she hung them up in the loft of the storehouse. The husband could see neither the cloth nor the clothes, but he had got the belief into his head that the cloth was so fine that he could not see, and so he only said : " Well yes, if it is so fine, it's very fine indeed." But one day his wife said to him : " You must go to the funeral to-day ; our neighbour, who died the other day, is going to be buried to-day, and so you had better use your new clothes." — Yes, he would go to the funeral, and she helped him to put the clothes on, for they were so fine, that he might easily tear them to pieces if he put them on himself. When he came to his neiglibour's farm the funeral feast had already begun, and the guests had been drinking hard ; their grief did not increase much you may depend, when they saw the last arrival in his new clothes. But when they set out for the churchyard, and the dead man peeped out through the hoies in his cofnn, he burst out laughing till the coffin shook. "Well, well," he cried ; "I can't help laughing when I see Joe Southend walking stark naked at my funeral ! " When the people heard this, they were not slow in taking the lid off the cofiin, and the man in the new clothes asked how it was that the man whose funeral they had been feasting at was lying in the coffin, talking and laughing ; "it would be more seemly if he was crying and weeping." "Well, tears never dug any one out of his grave yet," said the other, and so the two husbands found out at last how their wives had been plotting the whole thing against them. Then they went home and did the most sensible thing which they ever had done in their lives, and if there is anybody who Ukes to know what that was he must go and ask the birch rod over the door.
