“I see nothing but the horse hair in the birch; that’s all I see!”
“Of course you can’t where you stand,” said the man; “but just come and
lie down here, and stare straight up, and mind you don’t take your eyes
off the sky; and then you shall see what you shall see.”
But while Peter the third lay and stared up at the sky till his eyes
filled with tears, the man from Paradise Place took his horse and jumped
on its back, and rode off both with it and the cart and horse.
When the hoofs thundered along the road Peter the third jumped up; but
he was so taken aback when he found the man had gone off with his horse
that he hadn’t the sense to run after him till it was too late.
He was rather down in the mouth when he got home to his Goody; but when
she asked him what he had done with the horse, he said,—
“I gave it to the man too for Peter the second, for I thought it wasn’t
right he should sit in a cart, and scramble about from house to house;
so now he can sell the cart and buy himself a coach to drive about in.”
“Thank you heartily!” said his wife; “I never thought you could be so
kind.”
Well, when the man reached home, who had got the six hundred dollars and
the cart-load of clothes and money, he saw that all his fields were
ploughed and sown, and the first thing he asked his wife was, where she
had got the seed-corn from.
“Oh,” she said, “I have always heard that what a man sows he shall reap,
so I sowed the salt which our friends the north-country men laid up here
with us, and if we only have rain I fancy it will come up nicely.”
“Silly you are,” said her husband, “and silly you will be so long as you
live; but that is all one now, for the rest are not a bit wiser than
you. There is not a pin to choose between you.”
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