"'What's all this?' she cried. 'He has got his trotters on,' when she saw his shoes; 'and he's as black as a coal.'
"'Don't you know,' said her husband; 'all cats are grey in the dark, and all pigs black.'
"'I dare say,' she said; 'but black or white is always bright, and a fog is not like a bilberry. This pig has got breeches on.'
"'Plague take him!' said the man. 'I know well enough he is covered with fat all down his legs. Haven't I carried him till the sweat ran down my face?'
"'Nay, nay!' said the goody. 'He has silver buckles in his shoes, and silver buttons at his knees. My! if it isn't our Parish Clerk!' she screamed out.
"'I tell you it was a fat pig I took,' said the man, as he jumped up to see how things stood. 'Well! Well! Seeing is believing.' It was our clerk, both with shoes and buckles; but, for all, he stuck to it, it was the fattest pig he had put into the sack.
"'But what's done can't be undone,' he said; 'the best servant is one's own self; but, for all that, help is good, even if it comes out of the porridge-pot; wake up our Mary, old girl.'
"Now you must know Mary was their daughter, a ready and trusty lass; she had the strength of a man too, and always had her wits about her. So she was to take our clerk and bury him in an out-of-the-way dale, so that nothing should ever be heard of him. If she did this, she was to have a new suit of working clothes, which were meant for her mother.
"Well! The lassie took our clerk round the body, tossed him on her back, and strode off from the farm, not forgetting to take his hat. But when she had gone a bit of the way, she heard a fiddle going, for there was a dance at a farm near the road, and so she crept in and set our clerk down upright behind the back-stairs. There he sat with his hat between his hands, just as though he were begging an alms, and leaning against the wall and a post.
"After a while came a girl in a flurry.