The little old Woman had heard in her sleep the great, rough, gruff voice of the Great, Huge Bear; but she was so fast asleep that it was no more to her than the roaring of wind or the rumbling of thunder. And she had heard the middle voice of the Middle Bear, but it was only as if she had heard some one speaking in a dream. But when she heard the little, small, wee voice of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, it was so sharp and so shrill that it awakened her at once. Up she started; and when she saw the Three Bears on one side of the bed, she tumbled herself out at the other and ran to the window. Now the window was open, because the Bears, like good, tidy Bears as they were, always opened their bed-chamber window when they got up in the morning. Out the little old Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her. 154 A noodle story is a droll, or comic story, that follows the fortunes of very simple or stupid characters. There are many noodle stories among the favorites of the folk, and the three immediately following are among the best known. This version of "The Three Sillies" was collected from oral tradition in Suffolk, England. In the original the dangerous tool was an ax, but the collector informed Mr. Hartland, in whose _English Fairy and Folk Tales_ it is reprinted, that she had found it was really "a great big wooden mallet, as some one had left sticking there when they'd been _making-up_ the beer." This change, following the example of Jacobs, is made in the text of the story. This particular droll is widespread. Grimms' "Clever Elsie" is the same story, and a French version, "The Six Sillies," is in Lang's _Red Fairy Book_. A very fine Italian version, called "Bastienelo," is given in Crane's _Italian Popular Tales_. The tendency of people to "borrow trouble" is so universal that stories illustrating its ludicrous consequences have always had wide appeal. Some details of these variants are due to local environments. For instance, in the Italian story wine takes the place of beer, and it has been pointed out that there are "borrowing trouble" stories found in New York and Ohio in which the thing feared is the heavy iron door closing the mouth of the oven which in pioneer days was built in by the side of the fireplace. =THE THREE SILLIES=