no, keep away from me! cried old Nick, and kept her back with his pole.

[Pg 143]

"Thinking and believing do no harm to anybody," she said. "But I think you will do a wise thing in not closing your eyes to-night when your wife comes and draws a razor across your throat. But not a word about this to any one, do you hear?" she said, and off she went.

One gets to hear a good deal before one has done with this world—but did one ever hear the like of this? Could it be possible? The man felt as strange in his head as if he had rolled down the church steeple; but whatever it was that ailed him, there he stood pondering and brooding.

Pshaw! She was after all only a wicked woman, who wanted to set them against each other. Yes, that was it; and he was very sorry he had not given her a good thrashing for her trouble.

But although he worked away and toiled his best with his osiers, he could not get out of his head what Katie Grey had put into it; and when he came home in the evening he was so depressed and silent that his wife had never seen him in such a state before, so strange was he.

"Goodness knows, what can be the matter with my husband?" she thought; and then she suddenly recollected what Katie Grey had told her.

"I may as well take three hairs from his beard," she thought, "for when you have had a happy home for six and thirty years, it isn't likely you'll let it slip through your fingers all at once." But she did not[Pg 144] dare to speak to her husband,—she only asked him to lend her his razor.

He let her have it, but he sighed and thought to himself: "I wonder if she would do me any harm? I wonder if she really could? Oh, no! that's quite impossible."

But he put his axe close to his bed, and then they both lay down to rest.

Later on in the night she asked:

"Are you asleep, husband?"

This startled the man, but he did not say a word, and the wife stole out of bed and lighted a candle.

The man's heart began to beat violently.

The wife then took the razor and drew it three times along the leather belt of her husband's apron, and went towards the bed.

The blood rushed to the man's head, so that he almost lost his senses, but he lay as quiet as a stone, and only moved his hand towards the axe.

The wife then came close to the bed to cut the three hairs from his beard.

But as she leaned forward the man suddenly jumped up and seized his axe, with which he struck his wife, who fell down dead on the floor.

He felt he had done a very wicked deed, but he had not thought that things would come to this pass.

He became much distressed—for what was he going to do?

[Pg 145]

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31