WHICH WAS THE FOOLISHEST?

Edition and rights: Original English text from Project Gutenberg ebook #31201, marked public domain in the USA. The literary text below is reproduced without AI rewriting.

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In a little village that stood on a wide plain, where you
could see the sun from the moment he rose to the moment
he set, there lived two couples side by side. The men,
who worked under the same master, were quite good
friends, but the wives were always quarrelling, and the
subject they quarrelled most about was—which of the
two had the stupidest husband.

Unlike most women—who think that anything that
belongs to them must be better than what belongs to anyone
else—each thought her own husband the more foolish
of the two.

‘You should just see what he does!’ one said to her
neighbour. ‘He puts on the baby’s frock upside down,
and, one day, I found him trying to feed her with boiling
soup, and her mouth was scalded for days after. Then
he picks up stones in the road and sows them instead of
potatoes, and one day he wanted to go into the garden
from the top window, because he declared it was a shorter
way than through the door.’

‘That is bad enough, of course,’ answered the other;
‘but it is really nothing to what I have to endure every
day from my husband. If, when I am busy, I ask him
to go and feed the poultry, he is certain to give them
some poisonous stuff instead of their proper food, and
when I visit the yard next I find them all dead. Once
he even took my best bonnet, when I had gone away to
my sick mother, and when I came back I found he had
given it to the hen to lay her eggs in. And you know
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yourself that, only last week, when I sent him to buy
a cask of butter, he returned driving a hundred and fifty
ducks which someone had induced him to take, and not
one of them would lay.’

‘Yes, I am afraid he is trying,’ replied the first; ‘but
let us put them to the proof, and see which of them is
the most foolish.’

So, about the time that she expected her husband
home from work, she got out her spinning-wheel, and sat
busily turning it, taking care not even to look up from
her work when the man came in. For some minutes he
stood with his mouth open watching her, and as she still
remained silent, he said at last:

‘Have you gone mad, wife, that you sit spinning
without anything on the wheel?’

‘You may think that there is nothing on it,’ answered
she, ‘but I can assure you that there is a large skein of
wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven
into a coat for you.’

‘Dear me!’ he replied, ‘what a clever wife I have
got! If you had not told me I should never have known
that there was any wool on the wheel at all. But now
I really do seem to see something.’

The woman smiled and was silent, and after spinning
busily for an hour more, she got up from her stool, and
began to weave as fast as she could. At last she got up,
and said to her husband: ‘I am too tired to finish it
to-night, so I shall go to bed, and to-morrow I shall only
have the cutting and stitching to do.’

So the next morning she got up early, and after she
had cleaned her house, and fed her chickens, and put
everything in its place again, she bent over the kitchen
table, and the sound of her big scissors might be heard
snip! snap! as far as the garden. Her husband could
not see anything to snip at; but then he was so stupid
that was not surprising!

After the cutting came the sewing. The woman
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patted and pinned and fixed and joined, and then, turning
to the man, she said:

‘Now it is ready for you to try on.’ And she
made him take off his coat, and stand up in front of
her, and once more she patted and pinned and fixed and
joined, and was very careful in smoothing out every
wrinkle.

‘It does not feel very warm,’ observed the man at
last, when he had borne all this patiently for a long time.

‘That is because it is so fine,’ answered she; ‘you do
not want it to be as thick as the rough clothes you wear
every day.’

He did, but was ashamed to say so, and only answered:
‘Well, I am sure it must be beautiful since you say so,
and I shall be smarter than anyone in the whole village.
“What a splendid coat!” they will exclaim when they
see me. But it is not everybody who has a wife as
clever as mine.’

Meanwhile the other wife was not idle. As soon as
her husband entered she looked at him with such a look
of terror that the poor man was quite frightened.

‘Why do you stare at me so? Is there anything the
matter?’ asked he.

‘Oh! go to bed at once,’ she cried; ‘you must be very
ill indeed to look like that!’

The man was rather surprised at first, as he felt
particularly well that evening; but the moment his wife
spoke he became quite certain that he had something
dreadful the matter with him, and grew quite pale.

‘I dare say it would be the best place for me,’ he
answered, trembling; and he suffered his wife to take him
upstairs, and to help him off with his clothes.

‘If you sleep well during the night there may be a
chance for you,’ said she, shaking her head, as she tucked
him up warmly; ‘but if not——’ And of course the
poor man never closed an eye till the sun rose.

‘How do you feel this morning?’ asked the woman,
coming in on tip-toe when her house-work was finished.

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‘Oh, bad; very bad indeed,’ answered he; ‘I have not
slept for a moment. Can you think of nothing to make
me better?’

‘I will try everything that is possible,’ said the wife,
who did not in the least wish her husband to die, but was
determined to show that he was more foolish than the
other man. ‘I will get some dried herbs and make you a
drink, but I am very much afraid that it is too late. Why
did you not tell me before?’

‘I thought perhaps the pain would go off in a day or
two; and, besides, I did not want to make you unhappy,’
answered the man, who was by this time quite sure he
had been suffering tortures, and had borne them like a
hero. ‘Of course, if I had had any idea how ill I really
was, I should have spoken at once.’

‘Well, well, I will see what can be done,’ said the
wife, ‘but talking is not good for you. Lie still, and keep
yourself warm.’

All that day the man lay in bed, and whenever his
wife entered the room and asked him, with a shake of the
head, how he felt, he always replied that he was getting
worse. At last, in the evening, she burst into tears, and
when he inquired what was the matter, she sobbed out:

‘Oh, my poor, poor husband, are you really dead? I
must go to-morrow and order your coffin.’

Now, when the man heard this, a cold shiver ran
through his body, and all at once he knew that he was as
well as he had ever been in his life.

‘Oh, no, no!’ he cried, ‘I feel quite recovered!
Indeed, I think I shall go out to work.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ replied his wife. ‘Just
keep quite quiet, for before the sun rises you will be a
dead man.’

The man was very frightened at her words, and lay
absolutely still while the undertaker came and measured
him for his coffin; and his wife gave orders to the gravedigger
about his grave. That evening the coffin was sent
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home, and in the morning at nine o’clock the woman put
him on a long flannel garment, and called to the undertaker’s
men to fasten down the lid and carry him to the
grave, where all their friends were waiting them. Just
as the body was being placed in the ground the other
woman’s husband came running up, dressed, as far as anyone
could see, in no clothes at all. Everybody burst into
shouts of laughter at the sight of him, and the men laid
down the coffin and laughed too, till their sides nearly
split. The dead man was so astonished at this behaviour,
that he peeped out of a little window in the side of the
coffin, and cried out:

‘I should laugh as loudly as any of you, if I were not
a dead man.’

When they heard the voice coming from the coffin the
other people suddenly stopped laughing, and stood
as if they had been turned into stone. Then they rushed
with one accord to the coffin, and lifted the lid so that the
man could step out amongst them.

‘Were you really not dead after all?’ asked they.
‘And if not, why did you let yourself be buried?’

At this the wives both confessed that they had each
wished to prove that her husband was stupider than the
other. But the villagers declared that they could not
decide which was the most foolish—the man who allowed
himself to be persuaded that he was wearing fine clothes
when he was dressed in nothing, or the man who let himself
be buried when he was alive and well.

So the women quarrelled just as much as they did
before, and no one ever knew whose husband was the
most foolish.

[Adapted from the Neuisländischen Volksmärchen.]

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