Page:Legends of Rubezahl, and Other Tales (1845).djvu/189

 King Midas’s indigestion. As it was, instinct served instead of learning, and having hastily sharpened the kitchen knife, she opened the goat and the kids, and found in the stomach of the former a lump of gold as big as a golden pippin, and other lumps proportioned to their size in the stomachs of the kids.

Her riches now seemed to her immense, immeasurable; but, of course, with the accession of wealth came its cares; she got uneasy, anxious; her heart palpitated; she did not know whether to lock up the gold in her box, or to bury it in the cellar; she was afraid of thieves and treasure-seekers, yet she did not want the miserly Stephen all at once to know about the matter. And a very judicious precaution on her part, since the extreme probabilities were, that the grasping niggard would take possession of the whole treasure, and she and her children be not a whit the better for it. After meditating the point a long while, she remained as undecided as ever. At last, a thought struck her.

The priest of the village was the protector of all oppressed wives; a man who, as well as from duty as from an honourable desire to defend the weaker side, never failed to interfere very decidedly whenever any tyrannical parishioner of his was wretch enough to beat and maltreat his better-half; by dint of actual penances of a light nature, and the threat of heavier ecclesiastical punishment, in case of continued