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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 upstairs 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 plowing, 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 handful 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."
Peter looked first at the man, and then at the sky, and said, "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."
"You are crazy," said her husband, "and crazy you will be so long as you live. But that is all one now, for the others are not a bit better than you."
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Amaka for Kids
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