and asks why a stranger has gone off with his
property. She explains the whole affair, upon which he mounts a horse
and gallops away after the rogue who had thus taken advantage of his
wife's simplicity. The stranger, perceiving him approach, hides the
horse and cart behind a high hedge, takes part of the horse's tail and
hangs it on the branches of a birch-tree, and then lays himself down on
his back and gazes up into the sky. When Peter comes up to him, he
exclaims, still looking at the sky, "What a wonder! there is a man going
straight to heaven on a black horse!" Peter can see no such thing. "Can
you not?" says the stranger. "See, there is his tail, still on the
birch-tree. You must lie down in this very spot, and look straight up,
and don't for a moment take your eyes off the sky, and then you'll see--
what you'll see." So Peter lies down and gazes up at the sky very
intently, looking for the man going straight to heaven on a black horse.
Meanwhile the traveller escapes, with the cart-load of clothes and the
box of shining dollars, and the second horse besides. Peter, when he
reaches home, tells his wife that he had given the man from paradise the
other horse for her second husband to ride about on, for he was ashamed
to confess that he had been cheated as well as herself.[7] As to our
traveller, having found three goodies as great fools as his own, he
returned home, and saw that all his fields had been ploughed and sown;
so he asked his wife where she had got the seed from. "Oh," says she, "I
have always heard that what a man sows he shall also reap, so I sowed
the salt that our friends the north-countrymen laid up with us, and if
we only have rain, I fancy it will come up nicely."[8] "Silly you are,"
said her husband, "and silly you will be as long as you live. But that
is all one now, for the rest are not a bit wiser than you;--_there is
not a pin to choose between you_!"[9]

Now, if it be "a far cry" from Italy to Norway, it is still farther from
Norway to India; and yet it is in the southern provinces of our great
Asiatic empire that a story is current among the people, which, strange
as it may seem, is almost the exact counterpart of the Norse version of
the pretended pilgrim from paradise, of which the above is an abstract.
It is found in Pandit S.M. Natesa Sastri's _Folk-lore in Southern
India_, now in course of publication at Bombay; a work which, when
completed, will be of very great value, to students of