the man who sat
and drove the cart. When the other saw him he drove the horse and cart
into a wood, pulled a handful of hair out of the horse's tail, and ran
up a little hill, where he tied the hair fast to a birch-tree. Then he
lay down under the tree and began to look and stare at the sky.

"Well, well," said he, as if talking to himself, when Peter the third
came near. "Well! never before have I seen anything to match it."

Peter stood still for a time and looked at him, and wondered what was
come to him. At last he said--

"Why do you lie there and stare so?"

"I never saw anything like it," said the other. "A man has gone up to
heaven on a black horse. Here in the birch-tree is some of the horse's
tail hanging, and there in the sky you may see the black horse."

Peter stared first at the man and then at the sky, and said--

"For my part, I see nothing but some hair out of a horse's tail in the
birch-tree."

"Yes," said the other, "you cannot see it where you stand, but come here
and lie down, and look up, and take care not to take your eyes off the
sky."

Peter the third lay down and stared up at the sky till the tears ran
from his eyes. The man from Ringerige took his horse, mounted it, and
galloped away with it and the horse and cart. When he heard the noise
on the road, Peter the third sprang up, but when he found the man had
gone off with his horse he was so astonished that he did not think of
going after him till it was too late.

He was very down-faced when he went home to his wife, and when she asked
him what he had done with the horse, he said--

"I gave it to Peter the second, for I didn't think it was right he
should sit in a cart and jolt about from house to house in Himmerige.
Now then he can sell the cart, and buy himself a coach, and drive
about."

"Heaven bless you for that," said the woman. "I never thought you were
so kind-hearted a man."

When the Ringerige man reached home with his six hundred dollars, his
cart-load of clothes, and the money, he saw that all his fields were
ploughed and sown. The first question he put to his wife was how she had
got the seed.

"Well," said she, "I always heard that what a man sowed he reaped, so I
sowed the salt the North-people left here, and if we only have rain I
don't doubt but that it will come up nicely."

"You are silly," said the man, "and silly you must remain, but that does
not much matter, for the others are as silly as yourself."