tly at him for a few minutes, kept silence.

"And where might you be going to lodge to-night, good man, if I'm not
too bold?" asked she.

The old man heaved a deep sigh, and said he supposed he must lie out in
the forest.

"Well, that would be a great pity," remarked his kind hostess. "No
wonder your bones ache if you have no better shelter." As she said this,
she looked appealingly at her husband.

"My wife, I'm thinking, would like to offer you a bed," said the
woodman; "at least, if you don't mind sleeping in this clean kitchen, I
think that we could toss you up something of that sort that you need not
disdain."

"Disdain, indeed!" said the wife. "Why, Will, when there's not a tighter
cottage than ours in all the wood, and with a curtain, as we have, and a
brick floor, and everything so good about us--"

The husband laughed; the old man looked on with a twinkle in his eye.

"I'm sure I shall be humbly grateful," said he.

Accordingly, when supper was over, they made him up a bed on the floor,
and spread clean sheets upon it of the young wife's own spinning, and
heaped several fresh logs on the fire. Then they wished the stranger
good night, and crept up the ladder to their own snug little chamber.

"Disdain, indeed!" laughed the wife, as soon as they shut the door.
"Why, Will, how could you say it? I should like to see him disdain me
and mine. It isn't often, I'll engage to say, that he sleeps in such a
well-furnished kitchen."

The husband said nothing, but secretly laughed to himself.

"What are you laughing at, Will?" said his wife, as she put out the
candle.

"Why, you soft little thing," answered the woodman, "didn't you see that
bunch of green ash-keys in his cap; and don't you know that nobody would
dare to wear them but the Ouphe of the Wood? I saw him cutting those
very keys for himself as I passed to the sawmill this morning, and I
knew him again directly, though he has disguised himself as an old man."

"Bless us!" exclaimed the little wife; "is the Wood Ouphe in our
cottage? How frightened I am! I wish I hadn't put the candle out."

The husband laughed more and more.

"Will," said his wife, in a solemn voice, "I wonder how you dare laugh,
and that powerful creature under the very bed where you lie!"

"And she to be so pitiful over him," said the woodman, laughing till the
floor shook under him, "and to talk and boast of our house, and insist
on helping him to more potatoes, when he has