“Will you sell that cow, Goody?”
“Yes, that I will,” she answered.
“Well, what do you want for her?”
“Oh! I must have five shillings for the cow, but you shall have the hen
for ten pound.”
“Very good!” said the man; “I don’t want the hen, and you’ll soon get it
off your hands in the town, but I’ll give you five shillings for the
cow.
Well, she sold her cow for five shillings, but there was no one in the
town who would give ten pound for a lean tough old hen, so she went back
to the butcher, and said,—
“Do all I can, I can’t get rid of this hen, master! you must take it
too, as you took the cow.”
“Well,” said the butcher, “come along and we’ll see about it.” Then he
treated her both with meat and drink, and gave her so much brandy that
she lost her head, and didn’t know what she was about, and fell fast
asleep. But while she slept, the butcher took and dipped her into a
tar-barrel, and then laid her down on a heap of feathers; and when she
woke up, she was feathered all over, and began to wonder what had
befallen her.
“Is it me, or is it not me? No, it can never be me; it must be some
great strange bird. But what shall I do to find out whether it is me or
not. Oh! I know how I shall be able to tell whether it is me; if the
calves come and lick me, and our dog Tray doesn’t bark at me when I get
home, then it must be me, and no one else.”
Now, Tray, her dog, had scarce set his eyes on the strange monster which
came through the gate, than he set up such a barking, one would have
thought all the rogues and robbers in the world were in the yard.
“Ah, deary me,” said she, “I thought so; it can’t be me surely.” So she
went to the straw-yard, and the calves wouldn’t lick her, when they
snuffed in the strong smell of tar.
“No, no!” she said, “it can’t be me; it must be some strange outlandish
bird.”
So she crept up on the roof of the safe, and began to flap her arms, as
if they had been wings, and was just going to fly off.
When her husband saw all this, out he came with his rifle, and began to
take aim at her.
“Oh!” cried his wife, “don’t shoot, don’t shoot! it is only me.”
“If it’s you,” said her husband, “don’t stand up there like a goat on a
house-top, but come down and let me hear what you have to say for
yourself.”
So she crawled down again, but she hadn’t a shilling to shew, for the
crown she had got from the butcher she had thrown away in her
drunkenness. When her husband heard her story, he said, “You’re only
twice as silly as you were before,” and he got so angry that he made up
his mind to go away from her altogether, and never to come back till he
had found three other Goodies as silly as his own.
So he toddled off, and when he had walked a little way he saw a Goody,
who was running in and out of a newly-built wooden cottage with an empty
sieve, and every time she ran in, she threw her apron over the sieve
just as if she had something in it, and when she got in she turned it
upside down on the floor.
“Why, Goody!” he asked, “what are you doing!”
“Oh,” she answered, “I’m only carrying in a little sun; but I don’t know
how it is, when I’m outside, I have the sun in my sieve, but when I get
inside, somehow or other I’ve thrown it away. But in my old cottage I
had plenty of sun, though I never carried in the least bit. I only wish
I knew some one who would bring the sun inside; I’d give him three
hundred dollars and welcome.”
“Have you got an axe?” asked the man. “If you have, I’ll soon bring the
sun inside.”
So he got an axe, and cut windows in the cottage, for the carpenters had
forgotten them; then the sun shone in, and he got his three hundred
dollars.
“That was one of them,” said the man to himself, as he went on his way.
After a while he passed by a house, out of which came an awful screaming
and bellowing; so he turned in and saw a Goody, who was hard at work
banging her husband across 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.”