leave on the gander, not a tuft of down on the old grey goose; and, the job completed, they left the dame with her bag full of plumage and her ten plucked geese, not without assuring her, we may be certain, of their sympathy with her in her loss.
Next morning the good woman got up as usual and, remembering the feathers down stairs, dressed betimes, for she hoped, thrifty soul, to get them off her hands that very day at market. And then she bethought her of the ten plucked bodies lying out under the porch, and resolved that they should be buried before she went. But as she approached the door, on these decent rites intent, and was turning the key, there fell on her ears the sound of a familiar voice — and then another — and another — until at last the astonished dame heard in full chorus the well-known accents of all her plucked and poisoned geese! The throat of the old gander sounded, no doubt, a trifle husky, and the grey goose spoke in muffled tones suggestive of a chastening headache; but there was no mistaking those voices, and the dame, fumbling at the door, wondered what it all might mean.
Has a goose a ghost? Did any one ever read or hear of a spectre of a gander?
The key turned at last; the door opened, and there, quacking in subdued tones, suppliant and shivering, stood all her flock! There they stood, the ten miserable birds, with splitting headaches and parched tongues, contrite and dejected, asking to have their feathers back again. The situation was painful to both parties. The forlorn geese saw in each other’s persons the humiliating reflection of their own condition, while the dame, guiltily conscious of that bag full of feathers, remembered how the one lapse of Noah, — in that “aged surprisal of six
