The Three Sillies

A farmer’s daughter was engaged to a kind young gentleman.One evening her mother sent her down to the cellar to fetch beer for supper.In the cellar, the girl noticed an old wooden mallet stuck high in a beam.

She stared up at it and began to imagine the future.“If we marry and have a son, and he comes down here one day for beer, that mallet might fall and kill him!”She sat down on a barrel and cried and cried.

Upstairs, her mother wondered why the beer was taking so long and went down to look for her.The girl told her mother the whole sad story about the mallet.“Oh, how terrible!” said the mother, and she sat down and cried too.

Soon the father came looking for them both and heard the very same story, and he cried right along with them.At last the young gentleman arrived for supper and found all three of them crying in the cellar over the mallet and a son who did not even exist yet.

He laughed and laughed, then pulled the old mallet down so it could never hurt anyone.“I have never seen such sillies,” he said. “I will travel the country and look for three people even sillier than you.”“If I cannot find any, I will come straight home and marry you anyway.”

On his travels he saw a woman trying to lead her cow up a ladder to eat grass growing on the roof.He saw a man wrestling with his own trousers, hung on a peg, as if they were an impossible puzzle to solve.He even saw a whole village raking a pond with rakes, because they believed the moon’s reflection was the moon itself, fallen into the water.Since he found three people even sillier than his sweetheart’s family with ease, he went straight home, married her, and they lived happily together for the rest of their days.