All the while the husband kept on screaming and calling out,—
“Heaven help and comfort all who try on new shirts. If any one would teach my Goody another way of making a slit for the neck in my new shirts, I’d give him three hundred dollars down and welcome.”
“I’ll do it in the twinkling of an eye,” said the man, “if you’ll only give me a pair of scissors.”
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,—
“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 up-stairs 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 ploughing, 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.