voice, however loudly it might
call.'

Well, days and weeks and months and years passed, and nothing happened
to disturb the peace of the household. But one day the man was at the
barber's as usual, being shaved. The shop was full of people, and
his chin had just been covered with a lather of soap, when, suddenly
starting up from the chair, he called out in a loud voice:

'I won't come, do you hear? I won't come!'

The barber and the other people in the shop listened to him with
amazement. But again looking towards the door, he exclaimed:

'I tell you, once and for all, I do not mean to come, so go away.'

And a few minutes later he called out again:

'Go away, I tell you, or it will be the worse for you. You may call as
much as you like but you will never get me to come.'

And he got so angry that you might have thought that some one was
actually standing at the door, tormenting him. At last he jumped up, and
caught the razor out of the barber's hand, exclaiming:

'Give me that razor, and I'll teach him to let people alone for the
future.'

And he rushed out of the house as if he were running after some one,
whom no one else saw. The barber, determined not to lose his razor,
pursued the man, and they both continued running at full speed till they
had got well out of the town, when all of a sudden the man fell head
foremost down a precipice, and never was seen again. So he too, like the
others, had been forced against his will to follow the voice that called
him.

The barber, who went home whistling and congratulating himself on the
escape he had made, described what had happened, and it was noised
abroad in the country that the people who had gone away, and had never
returned, had all fallen into that pit; for till then they had never
known what had happened to those who had heard the voice and obeyed its
call.

But when crowds of people went out from the town to examine the
ill-fated pit that had swallowed up such numbers, and yet never seemed
to be full, they could discover nothing. All that they could see was a
vast plain, that looked as if it had been there since the beginning of
the world. And from that time the people of the country began to die
like ordinary mortals all the world over.(13)

(13) Roumanian Tales from the German of Mite Thremnitz.

THE SIX SILLIES

ONCE upon a time there was a young girl who reached the age of
thirty-seven without ever having had a lover, for she was so fo