to you.'

So, with a low bow, he vanished from before them, leaving the maidens
weeping at having lost in one moment both the ball and the prince.

[Adapted from _North American Indian Legends_.]

_WHICH WAS THE FOOLISHEST?_

In a little village that stood on a wide plain, where you could see
the sun from the moment he rose to the moment he set, there lived two
couples side by side. The men, who worked under the same master, were
quite good friends, but the wives were always quarrelling, and the
subject they quarrelled most about was--which of the two had the
stupidest husband.

Unlike most women--who think that anything that belongs to them must
be better than what belongs to anyone else--each thought her own
husband the more foolish of the two.

'You should just see what he does!' one said to her neighbour. 'He
puts on the baby's frock upside down, and, one day, I found him trying
to feed her with boiling soup, and her mouth was scalded for days
after. Then he picks up stones in the road and sows them instead of
potatoes, and one day he wanted to go into the garden from the top
window, because he declared it was a shorter way than through the
door.'

'That is bad enough, of course,' answered the other; 'but it is really
_nothing_ to what I have to endure every day from _my_ husband. If,
when I am busy, I ask him to go and feed the poultry, he is certain to
give them some poisonous stuff instead of their proper food, and when
I visit the yard next I find them all dead. Once he even took my best
bonnet, when I had gone away to my sick mother, and when I came back I
found he had given it to the hen to lay her eggs in. And you know
yourself that, only last week, when I sent him to buy a cask of
butter, he returned driving a hundred and fifty ducks which someone
had induced him to take, and not one of them would lay.'

'Yes, I am afraid he _is_ trying,' replied the first; 'but let us put
them to the proof, and see which of them is the most foolish.'

So, about the time that she expected her husband home from work, she
got out her spinning-wheel, and sat busily turning it, taking care not
even to look up from her work when the man came in. For some minutes
he stood with his mouth open watching her, and as she still remained
silent, he said at last:

'Have you gone mad, wife, that you sit spinning without anything on
the wheel?'

'_You_ may think that there is nothing on it,' answered she, 'but I
can a