“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 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.
“Oh yes,” said the man; “I know him very well.”
“Well,” asked the Goody, “how do things go with him, poor dear soul?”
“Only middling,” was the answer; “he goes about begging from house to
house, and has neither food nor a rag to his back. As for money, he
hasn’t a sixpence to bless himself with.”
“Mercy on me!” cried out the Goody; “he never ought to go about such a
figure when he left so much behind him. Why, there’s a whole cupboard
full of old clothes up-stairs which belonged to him, besides a great
chest full of money yonder. Now, if you will take them with you, you
shall have a horse and cart to carry them. As for the horse, he can keep
it, and sit on the cart, and drive about from house to house, and then
he needn’t trudge on foot.”
So the man got a whole cart-load of clothes, and a chest full of shining
dollars, and as much meat and drink as he would; and when he had got all
he wanted, he jumped into the cart and drove off.
“That was the third,” he said to himself, as he went along.
Now this Goody’s third husband was a little way off in a field
ploughing, and when he saw a strange man driving off from the farm with
his horse and cart, he went home and asked his wife who that was that
had just started with the black horse.
“Oh, do you mean him?” said the Goody; “why, that was a man from
Paradise, who said that Peter, my dear second husband, who is dead and
gone, is in a sad plight, and that he goes from house to house begging,
and has neither clothes nor money; so I just sent him all those old
clothes he left behind him, and the old money-box with the dollars in
it.”
The man saw how the land lay in a trice, so he saddled his horse and
rode off from the farm at full gallop. It wasn’t long before he was
close behind the man who sat and drove the cart; but when the latter saw
this he drove the cart into a thicket by the side of the road, pulled
out a handfull of hair from the horse’s tail, jumped up on a little rise
in the wood, where he tied the hair fast to a birch, and then lay down
under it, and began to peer and stare up at the sky.
“Well, well, if I ever!” he said, as Peter the third came riding up.
“No! I never saw the like of this in all my born days!”
Then Peter stood and looked at him for some time, wondering what had
come over him; but at last he asked,—
“What do you lie there staring at?”
“No,” kept on the man, “I never did see anything like it!—here is a man
going straight up to heaven on a black horse, and here you see his
horse’s tail still hanging in this birch; and yonder up in the sky you
see the black horse.”