Page:Merry tricks of Leper the taylor.pdf/11

(11) drank with his sister and neighbours, who had come to see his corpse: and poor Sandy went home with a skinful of terror, and a sorting of sore bones, took a sore fever, and died in a few days after, so be got quite of his cukolder, and Leper's mother got her load of meal.

Leper's mother was a careful industrious wife, but as the bye word is, "a working mother makes a dally daughter," and so it happened here, for she had two idle gleaket sluts of daughters, that would do nothing but lye in their beds in the morning, till, as the saying is "the sun was like to burn a hole in their backsides." The old woman, who was bleaching some cloth was very early at work in the mornings and Leper's patience being worn out with the laziness of his sisters, he resolved to play a trick on them, for their reformation ; so he goes and gets a mort-cloth, and spreads it on the bed above them, and sends the dead bell through the town, inviting the people next day at four o'clock afternoon, to the burial of his sisters, for they had died suddenly: this brought all the neighbour wives in, who one after another lifted uр the mort-cloth, and said with a sigh, they've gone