Page:Tales from the Fjeld.djvu/234

212 is dead, and they bury him to-day, and so you had better put on your new clothes."

"Yes, very true, he must go to the funeral;" and she helped him on with his new suit, for it was so fine, he might tear it asunder if he put it on alone.

So when he came up to the farm where the funeral was to be, they had all drank hard and long, and you may fancy their grief was not greater when they saw him come in in his new suit. But when the train set off for the churchyard, and the dead man peeped through the breathing holes, he burst out into a loud fit of laughter.

"Nay! nay!" he said, "I can't help laughing, though it is my funeral, for if there isn't Olof Southgrange walking to my funeral stark naked!"

When the bearers heard that, they were not slow in taking the lid off the coffin, and the other husband, he in the new suit, asked how it was that he, over whom they had just drank his funeral ale, lay there in his coffin and chattered and laughed, when it would be more seemly if he wept.

"Ah!" said the other, "you know tears never yet dug up any one out of his grave—that's why I laughed myself to life again."

But the end of all their talk was that it came out that their goodies had played them those tricks. So the husbands went home, and did the wisest thing either of them had done for a long time; and if any one wishes to know what it was, he had better go and ask the birch cudgel.