hundred years, and unexpected inebriation from the unknown effects of wine,” — has been excused by religion and the unanimous voice of posterity. She, and her neighbors with her, however, had hastily misjudged the geese, and, finding them dead drunk, had stripped them, without remembering for a moment that if feathers are easy to get off they are very hard to put on. Here were the geese before her, bald, penitent, and shaking with the cold. There in the corner were their feathers, in a bag. But how could they be brought together? Even supposing each goose could recognize its own, how were they to be reclothed? Tarring and feathering were out of the question, for that would be to add insult to injury; and to try to stick all the feathers into their places again, one by one, was a labor such as only folk in fairy tales could ever hope to accomplish.
So she called in her neighbors again; but they proved only sorry comforters, for they reminded her that after all the fault was her own, that it was she and no one else who had thrown the brandied cherries to the geese. The poor fowls, brought up to confide in her, and repaying her care of them by trustful reliance, could never, her neighbors said, have been expected to guess that when she threw the vinous fruit in their path she, their own familiar mistress, at whose hands they looked for all that was good, could have intended to betray them into the shocking excesses of intoxication, and deceive them to their ruin. Yet so it had been. Accepting the feast spread out before them, the geese had partaken gladly, gratefully, freely, of the insidious cherry; and the result was this, that the geese were in one place and their feathers were in another! At last, weary of the reproaches of her friends, the widow gathered all her bald
