"'Without wool!' said the goody; 'I have wool, only you can't see it; it's of the fine sort.' So, when she had carded it all, she took her wheel, and fell a-spinning.
"'Nay! nay! this is all labour lost!" said the man. 'There you sit, wearing out your wheel, as it spins and hums, and all the while you've nothing on it.'
"'Nothing on it!' said the goody; 'the thread is so fine, it takes better eyes than yours to see it, that's all.'
"So, when her spinning was over, she set up her loom, and put the woof in, and threw the shuttle, and wove cloth. Then she took it out of the loom and pressed it and cut it out, and sewed a new suit of clothes for her husband out of it, and when it was ready, she hung the suit up in the linen closet. As for the man, he could see neither cloth nor clothes; but as he had once for all got it into his head that it was too fine for him to see, he went on saying, 'Aye, aye, I understand it all, it is so fine because it is so fine.'
"Well! in a day or two his goody said to him,
"'To-day you must go to a funeral. Farmer Northgrange is dead, and they bury him to-day, and so you had better put on your new clothes.'
"'Yes, very true, he must go to the funeral;' and she helped him on with his new suit, for it was so fine, he might tear it asunder if he put it on alone.
"So when he came up to the farm, where the funeral was to be, they had all drank hard and long, and you may fancy their grief was not greater when they saw him come in in his new suit. But when the train set off for the churchyard, and the dead man peeped through the breathing holes, he burst out into a loud fit of laughter.
"'Nay! nay!' he said, 'I can't help laughing, though it is my funeral, for if there isn't Olof Southgrange walking to my funeral stark naked!'
"When the bearers heard that, they were not slow in taking the lid off the coffin, and the other husband, he in the new suit, asked how it was that he, over whom they had just drank his funeral ale, lay there in his coffin and chatted and laughed, when it would be more seemly if he wept.