there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the
constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was,
I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.

154

A noodle story is a droll, or comic story, that
follows the fortunes of very simple or stupid
characters. There are many noodle stories among
the favorites of the folk, and the three
immediately following are among the best known.
This version of "The Three Sillies" was
collected from oral tradition in Suffolk,
England. In the original the dangerous tool was
an ax, but the collector informed Mr. Hartland,
in whose _English Fairy and Folk Tales_ it is
reprinted, that she had found it was really "a
great big wooden mallet, as some one had left
sticking there when they'd been _making-up_ the
beer." This change, following the example of
Jacobs, is made in the text of the story. This
particular droll is widespread. Grimms' "Clever
Elsie" is the same story, and a French version,
"The Six Sillies," is in Lang's _Red Fairy
Book_. A very fine Italian version, called
"Bastienelo," is given in Crane's _Italian
Popular Tales_. The tendency of people to
"borrow trouble" is so universal that stories
illustrating its ludicrous consequences have
always had wide appeal. Some details of these
variants are due to local environments. For
instance, in the Italian story wine takes the
place of beer, and it has been pointed out that
there are "borrowing trouble" stories found in
New York and Ohio in which the thing feared is
the heavy iron door closing the mouth of the
oven which in pioneer days was built in by the
side of the fireplace.

=THE THREE SILLIES=

Once upon a time there was a farmer and his wife who had one daughter,
and she was courted by a gentleman. Every evening he used to come and
see her, and stop to supper at the farmhouse, and the daughter used to
be sent down into the cellar to draw the beer for supper. So one evening
she had gone down to draw the beer, and she happened to look up at the
ceiling while she was drawing, and she saw a mallet stuck in one of the
beams. It must have been there a long, long time, but somehow or other
she had never notic