A well known English version is to this effect: There was a young man who courted a farmer’s daughter, and one evening when he came to the house she was sent to the cellar for beer. Seeing an axe stuck in a beam above her head, she thought to herself, “Suppose I were married and had a son, and he were to grow up, and be sent to this cellar for beer, and this axe were to fall and kill him--oh, dear! oh dear!” and there she sat crying and crying, while the beer flowed all over the cellar floor, until her old father and mother come in succession and blubber along with her about the hypothetical death of her imaginary grown up son. The young man goes off in quest of three bigger fools, and sees a woman hoisting a cow on to the roof of her cottage to eat the grass that grew among the thatch, and to keep the animal from falling off, she ties a rope round its neck, then goes into the kitchen, secures at her waist the rope, which she had dropped down the chimney, and presently the cow stumbles over the roof, and the woman is pulled up the flue till she sticks half way. In an inn he sees a man attempting to jump into his trousers--a favourite incident in this class of stories; and farther along he meets with a party raking the moon out of a pond. Another English variant relates that a young girl having been left alone in the house, her mother finds her in tears when she comes home, and asks the cause of her distress. “Oh,” says the girl, “while you were away, a brick fell down the chimney, and I thought, if it had fallen on me I might have been killed!” The only novel adventure which the girl’s betrothed meets with, in his quest of three bigger fools, is an old woman trying to drag an oven with a rope to the table where the dough lay. * * * * *