[3]
A well-known English version is to this effect: There was a young man
who courted a farmer's daughter, and one evening when he came to the
house she was sent to the cellar for beer. Seeing an axe stuck in a beam
above her head, she thought to herself, "Suppose I were married and had
a son, and he were to grow up, and be sent to this cellar for beer, and
this axe were to fall and kill him--oh dear! oh dear!" and there she sat
crying and crying, while the beer flowed all over the cellar-floor,
until her old father and mother come in succession and blubber along
with her about the hypothetical death of her imaginary grown-up son. The
young man goes off in quest of three bigger fools, and sees a woman
hoisting a cow on to the roof of her cottage to eat the grass that grew
among the thatch, and to keep the animal from falling off, she ties a
rope round its neck, then goes into the kitchen, secures at her waist
the rope, which she had dropped down the chimney, and presently the cow
stumbles over the roof, and the woman is pulled up the flue till she
sticks half-way. In an inn he sees a man attempting to jump into his
trousers--a favourite incident in this class of stories; and farther
along he meets with a party raking the moon out of a pond.
Another English variant relates that a young girl having been left alone
in the house, her mother finds her in tears when she comes home, and
asks the cause of her distress.
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