“My father has gone to make bad worse,” replied Ulenspiegel, “and my mother is engaged in bringing us shame or loss.”
“Explain,” said the horseman.
Ulenspiegel answered:
“My father at this moment is deepening the holes in his field so as to bring from bad to worse the huntsmen who trample down his corn. My mother has gone to borrow money: if she repays too little ’twill shame us, if too much ’twill be our loss.”
The man asked then which way he should go.
“Where the geese are,” replied Ulenspiegel.
The man went away and came back just when Ulenspiegel was making an oared galley out of Claes’s other shoe.
“You have misled me,” said he: “where the geese are is nothing but mud and marsh in which they are paddling.”
Ulenspiegel answered to this:
“I did not tell you to go where the geese paddle, but where they go.”