‘Have you gone mad, wife, that you sit spinning without anything on the wheel?’
‘You may think that there is nothing on it,’ answered she, ‘but I can assure you that there is a large skein of wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven into a coat for you.’
‘Dear me!’ he replied, ‘what a clever wife I have got! If you had not told me I should never have known that there was any wool on the wheel at all. But now I really do seem to see something.’
The woman smiled and was silent, and after spinning busily for an hour more, she got up from her stool, and began to weave as fast as she could. At last she got up, and said to her husband: ‘I am too tired to finish it to-night, so I shall go to bed, and to-morrow I shall only have the cutting and stitching to do.’
So the next morning she got up early, and after she had cleaned her house, and fed her chickens, and put everything in its place again, she bent over the kitchen table, and the sound of her big scissors might be heard snip! snap! as far as the garden. Her husband could not see anything to snip at; but then he was so stupid that was not surprising!
After the cutting came the sewing. The woman patted and pinned and fixed and joined, and then, turning to the man, she said:
‘Now it is ready for you to try on.’ And she made him take off his coat, and stand up in front of her, and once more she patted and pinned and fixed and joined, and was very careful in smoothing out every wrinkle.
‘It does not feel very warm,’ observed the man at last, when he had borne all this patiently for a long time.
‘That is because it is so fine,’ answered she; ‘you do not want it to be as thick as the rough clothes you wear every day.’
He did, but was ashamed to say so, and only answered: ‘Well, I am sure it must be beautiful since you say so, and I shall be smarter than anyone in the whole village. “What a splendid coat!” they will exclaim when they see me. But it is not everybody who has a wife as clever as mine.’