Presently the wife came back and found the old woman weeping in real earnest over the loss of her nose.  “Never mind, I’ll find it and fix it on for you,” so saying she felt about for the nose till she found it, clapped it on to the old woman’s face and told her to hold it tight and it would soon grow again.  Then she sat down where she had sat before and began to lament the cruelty of her husband in bringing a false charge against her and challenged him to come out and see the miracle which had occurred to indicate her innocence.  She repeated this so often that at last her husband began to wonder what she meant, and took a lamp and went out to see.  When he found her sitting on the ground without a blemish on her face, although he had seen her with his own eyes go to the Jugi’s house, he could not doubt her virtue and had to receive her back into the house.

Thus by her cunning the faithless wife escaped the punishment which she deserved.

CIII.  The Industrious Bride.

Once upon a time a party of three or four men went to a village to see if a certain girl would make a suitable bride for the son of one of their friends; and while they were talking to her, another young woman came up.  The visitors asked the first girl where her father was and she told them that he had gone to “meet water.”

Then they asked where her mother was, and she said that she had gone “to make two men out of one.”  These answers puzzled the questioners, and they did not know what more to say; as they stood silent the other girl got up and went away remarking, “While I have been waiting here, I might have carded a seer of cotton.”  The men who were looking for a girl who would make a good wife, at once concluded that they had found what they wanted:  “How industrious she must be to talk like that” thought they—­“much better than this other girl who can only give us incomprehensible answers.”  And before they left the village they set everything in train for a match between their friend’s son and the girl who seemed so industrious.

When they got home and told their wives what they had done they got well laughed at:  their wives declared that it was quite easy to understand what the first girl had meant:  of course she meant that her father had gone to reap thatching grass and her mother had gone to thresh dal.  The poor men only gaped with astonishment at this explanation.

However the marriage they had arranged duly took place, but the fact was that the bride was entirely ignorant of how to clean and spin cotton.  It was not long before this was found out, for, in the spring, when there was no work in the fields, her father-in-law set all the women of the household to spinning cotton; and told them that they and their husbands should have no new clothes until they had finished their task.  The bride, who had been so carefully chosen, tried to learn how to spin by watching the others,