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 Her Husband upstairs waited some time, but as his Wife did not return, and his thirst grew greater, he said: ‘I must go to the cellar myself to see what has become of Elsa.’

But when he got to the cellar, and found all the others sitting together in tears, caused by the fear that a child which Elsa might one day have, if she married Hans, might be killed by the falling of the pickaxe, when it went to draw beer, he too cried—

‘What a Clever Elsa we have!’

Then he, too, sat down and added his lamentations to theirs.

The bridegroom waited alone upstairs for a long time; then, as nobody came back, he thought: ‘They must be waiting for me down there, I must go and see what they are doing.’

So down he went, and when he found them all crying and lamenting in a heart-breaking manner, each one louder than the the other, he asked: ‘What misfortune can possibly have happened?’