Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/85

 Rh thou laughest?' He replied to his wife, 'I shall not tell thee what I hear, and why I laugh.' The woman said to her husband, 'I know why thou laughest; thou laughest at me because I am one-eyed.' The man then said to his wife, 'I saw that thou wast one-eyed before I loved thee, and before we married and sat down in our house.' When the woman heard her husband's word she was quiet.

"But once at night, as they were lying on their bed, and it was past midnight, it happened that a rat played with his wife on the top of the house, and that both fell to the ground. Then the wife of the rat said to her husband, 'Thy sport is bad; thou saidst to me that thou wouldst play, but when we came together we fell to the ground, so that I broke my back.

"When the servant of God heard the talk of the rat's wife, as he was lying on his bed, he laughed. Now, as soon as he laughed his wife arose, seized him, and said to him as she held him fast, 'Now this time I will not let thee go out of this house except thou tell me what thou nearest and why thou laughest.' The man begged the woman, saying, 'Let me go;' but the woman would not listen to her husband's entreaty."

The husband then tells his wife that he knows the language of beasts and birds, and she is content; but when he wakes in the morning he finds he has lost his wonderful gift; and the moral of the tale is added most ungallantly, "If a man shews and tells his thoughts to a woman, God will punish him for it." Though, perhaps, it is better, for the sake of the gentler sex, that the tale should be pointed with this unfair moral, than that the African story should proceed like all the other variations, and save the husband's gift at the cost of the wife's skin.