Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/193

 Rh year spent in dancing, or the wife wholly got over her fright; but I am assured they lived happily ever after; saw their great-great-grandchildren; and that their descendants are scattered through the country to this day.—(D. M., gamekeeper.)

xxvii.—.

Part I.—The Nine Yards.

There lived once on a time in Sutherland a widow, who had one son, and he was a very stupid boy; so stupid that he could not be trusted out of sight, and that he had no idea how to buy or sell. One day his mother had nine yards of home-spun to sell; and there was a market within a few miles of her, at which she wished to show it for sale; but she could not go herself, and had no one to send but her son, and she thought a great deal how she was to prevent him doing something stupid with it, and being cheated. At last she thought that as the fair lasted three days she might send him every day with three yards, and that he could not go far wrong in getting a price for so small a quantity. So she sent him off with the first three, and charged him to bring it home if he did not get plenty of bidders and a long price for it. Nobody at the fair noticed the stupid boy and his little bundle; and he was turning to go home when a butcher met him, and asked him if he would sell the three yards of cloth. The boy said it was for sale, if he could get anything for it. "I will give you the two best things you ever saw in your life," said the butcher, and pulled out of his pocket a mouse and a bee. Presently the bee began to fiddle, and the mouse to dance, and they were the strangest pair you ever saw. "Done," cried the stupid boy, and hastened home to his mother with the mouse and the bee. When she saw for what he sold her stuff she was so angry that she flogged him soundly. Next day, however, she told him to take the next three yards and sell them better than the first, or that she would give him a terrible thrashing, and bread and water for a week.

Our stupid boy came to the fair, and began looking about for the butcher again, like a goose that he was. Very soon he saw him poming. "Have you any more homespun to sell to-day, my little