The Three Sillies

Once upon a time, a farmer and his wife had a daughter, and a young gentleman came to visit her every evening. Each night, they all had supper together, and the daughter went down to the cellar to fetch a jug of apple juice. One evening, as she filled the jug, she looked up and saw a big wooden mallet stuck in the ceiling. “Oh dear,” she thought, “if I marry my sweetheart and we have a little boy, that mallet might fall and bonk him on the head!” So she sat down and began to cry.

Upstairs, they wondered why she was taking so long, so her mother went down to look. “Why are you crying?” asked her mother. The daughter pointed at the mallet and told her all about it. “Oh dear, what a terrible thing that would be!” said the mother, and she sat down and cried too. Then the father went down, and he heard the story, and he sat down and cried too.

At last, the young man went down to the cellar himself. There were the three of them, crying their eyes out, while the apple juice ran all over the floor. When they told him why, the young man laughed and laughed. He reached up, pulled the mallet out of the ceiling, and set it on the floor. “I have never met three such sillies in all my life,” he said. “I will go out into the world, and if I find three people sillier than you, I will come back and marry your daughter.”

So off he went, and soon he saw a woman trying to push her cow up a ladder onto the roof of her house. “Grass is growing on my roof, and my cow would like to eat it,” she said. The young man climbed up, cut the grass, and tossed it down to the cow. “That is one silly,” he said to himself.

Next, he stayed at an inn, and in the morning he saw a man trying to jump into his pants. The man had hung his pants on a hook, and he ran and jumped at them again and again. The young man showed him how to put them on, one leg at a time. “That is two sillies,” he said to himself.

Then one night, he came to a village where everyone was standing around a pond. They had rakes and brooms and buckets, and they were splashing about in the water. “The moon has fallen into the pond, and we are trying to get it out!” they cried. The young man told them to look up at the sky, where the moon was shining as bright as ever. “That is three sillies,” he said with a smile. So he went back home and married the farmer’s daughter, and they lived happily ever after.