Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/362

 176 the head with a beetle, and over his head she had drawn a shirt without any slit for the neck.

"Why, Goody!" he asked, "will you beat your husband to death?"

"No," she said, "I only must have a hole in this shirt for his neck to come through."

All the while the husband kept on screaming and calling out,—

"Heaven help and comfort all who try on new shirts! If any one would teach my Goody another way of making a slit for the neck in my new shirts I'd give him three hundred dollars down, and welcome."

"I'll do it in the twinkling of an eye," said the man, "if you'll only give me a pair of scissors."

So he got a pair of scissors, and snipped a hole in the the neck, and went off with his three hundred dollars.

"That was another of them," he said to himself, as he walked along.

Last of all, he came to a farm, where he made up his mind to rest a bit. So when he went in, the mistress asked him—

"Whence do you come, master?"

"Oh!" said he, "I come from Paradise Place," for that was the name of his farm.

"From Paradise Place!" she cried, "you don't say so! Why, then, you must know my second husband Peter, who is dead and gone, God rest his soul!"

For you must know this Goody had been married three times, and as her first and last husbands had been bad, she had made up her mind that the second only was gone to heaven.