It's a story about a young man who is engaged to be married, and one time when he's visiting his fiancée and future in-laws, the girl goes into the cellar to draw a pitcher of beer, and as she's sitting there she looks up and sees an axe in the ceiling.
"Goodness," she says to herself. "That axe looks dangerous. I wonder if it's wedged in good and tight. What if it isn't? Or what if it is now, but all the pounding from people walking about upstairs loosens it? Why, what if one day, years from now, when my young man and I are married and have a son, we send him downstairs to draw beer, and the axe falls, and it lands on his head and kills him?" She is overcome by grief at the prospect and begins weeping bitterly.
Meanwhile, upstairs they are getting pretty thirsty, and so the girl's mother comes down to see what's the matter. The girl tells her mother the whole story about how someday there might be a boy who might be under the axe when it might fall and thus might be killed, and soon there are two people crying in the cellar.
As nobody upstairs is getting any the less thirsty, the girl's father makes his apologies to the family's guest and heads down into the cellar, but wouldn't you know it, he hears the story and is just as sure of the horribleness of it as his wife before him and his daughter before her, and he sits on down next to them and they're all three of them blubbering like a bunch of babies.
Finally the fiancé comes down to see what all the fuss is about, and he hears the whole story, and wouldn't it be terrible when their son was laid out in the front parlor in his best clothes, dead as a doornail because of that dreadful axe in the dreadful ceiling.
And the fiancé reaches up, and grabs the handle, and pulls, and the axe comes out just as easy, and he looks down at the three people who sit staring at him through puffy red eyes and he says, "I have never met three such ridiculous sillies in my entire life, and if I ever met three more ridiculously silly than you I will be back, but if I were you I would not be expecting me anytime soon."
Well, go out he does and as he does in fact find three more ridiculously silly than he thought possible he does come back and marry the poor girl, and they never have a son but a set of healthy daughters, though send them down into the cellar he will not because he wants them where he can keep his eyes on them so they don't get into their mother's former ways of thinking.
And there's more about the three sillies he finds, and what they do, but the axe is the part of the story that always stays with me, and so that's the part I'm sharing with you.
2 comments:
I think this is from Aesop's Fables and I have looked for this a long time. I am glad to have found it and want it framed and hung on a wall in my home as it seems to mimic my life....LOL!!
Aesop would have given his moral, ir comment at the end. This comes from an old English folk take.
Find it in Sacred texts. Here be the footnotes.
Footnotes
1 Folk-Lore Journal, vol. ii. p. 40.
2 Miss Burne, who collected this story, informs me that she finds the dangerous tool was, not an axe, but "a great big wooden mallet, as some one had left sticking there when they'd been making-up the beer," i.e., stopping up the barrels.
3 Miss Burne writes to me as follows:--"I find my sister-in-law, also a Staffordshire woman, knew the story when a child, with the variation of an old woman weeding by candlelight at noonday, instead of the moonrakers." The story has many variants; but I know of none better told than this.
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