To return to the Norse tale.  As in our nursery rhyme, when the goody reaches home, the dog barks at her; then she goes to the calves’ house, but the calves, having sniffed the tar with which she was smeared, turn away from her in disgust.  She is now fully convinced that she has been transformed into some outlandish bird, so she climbs on to the roof of a shed, and begins to flap her arms as if she were about to fly, when out comes her goodman, and seeing a suspicious-looking creature on the roof of the shed, he fetches his gun and is going to shoot at his goody, when he recognises her voice.  Amazed at such a piece of folly, he resolves to leave her and not come back till he has found three goodies as silly.  He meets with a female descendant of the Schildburgers, evidently, carrying into her cottage sunshine in a sieve, there being no window in the house:  he cuts out a window for her and is well paid for his trouble.  He next comes to a house where an old woman is thumping her goodman on the head with a beetle, in order to force over him a shirt without a slit for the neck, which she had drawn over his head:  he cuts a slit in the shirt with a pair of scissors, and is amply rewarded for his ingenuity.  His third adventure is similar to that of the “pilgrim” in the Italian version: 

At another house he informs the goody that he came from Paradise Place—­ which was the name of his own farm—­and she asks him if he knew her second husband in paradise. (She had been married twice before she took her present husband, who was an old curmudgeon, and she liked her second husband best—­she was sure he had gone to heaven.) He replies that he knew him very intimately, but, poor man, he was far from well off, having to go about begging from house to house.  The goody gives him a cart-load of clothes and a box of shining dollars, for her dear second husband; for why should he go about begging in paradise when there was so much of everything in their house?  So the stranger, jumps into the cart and drives off, as fast as possible.  But Peter, the goody’s third husband, sees him on the road, and recognising his own horse and cart, hastens home to his wife, and asks why a stranger has gone off with his property.  She explains the whole affair, upon which he mounts a horse and gallops away after the rogue who had thus taken advantage of his wife’s simplicity.  The stranger, perceiving him approach, hides the horse and cart behind a high hedge, takes part of the horse’s tail and hangs it on the branches of a birch-tree, and then lays himself down on his back and gazes up into the sky.  When Peter comes up to him, he exclaims, still looking at the sky, “What a wonder! there is a man going straight to heaven on a black horse!” Peter can see no such thing.  “Can you not?” says the stranger.  “See, there is his tail, still on the birch-tree.  You must lie down in this very spot, and look straight up, and don’t for a moment take your eyes off the sky, and then you’ll