“Why, I caught them just here,” said Serkis. “I dug them from the ground.”
“Alas!” exclaimed the ploughmen; “the woman is right, he has really lost his mind.”
And as they bound him with ropes some of the farmers said:
“He of late has been giving signs of this.”
“It is a hereditary disease,” said some others, “many members of his family have been crazy.”
So, treating the poor man as a lunatic, they brought him to his home and bound him to a pillar after whipping him. At night, when everybody else had gone, the woman approached her husband, saying:
“How now, husband? Are you afraid of a woman’s tricks or not? This was the least of all.”
“For Heaven’s sake, wife, untie me,” said Serkis in a pitiful voice. “Be sure my first prayer hereafter shall be to be preserved from a woman’s tricks.”
She released him and thereafter he was wise as respects women.