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 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 Neuislandische Volksmarchen.]

Asmund and Signy

Long, long ago, in the days when fairies, witches, giants and ogres
still visited the earth, there lived a king who reigned over a great and
beautiful country. He was married to a wife whom he dearly loved, and
had two most promising children--a son called Asmund, and