The Crock of Gold #221165

The Grey Woman and the Thin Woman were so incensed at being answered that they married the two Philosophers in order to be able to pinch them in bed, but the skins of the Philosophers were so thick that they did not know they were being pinched. They repaid' the fury of the women with such tender affection that these vicious creatures almost expired of chagrin, and once, in a very ecstasy of exasperation, after having been kissed by their husbands, they uttered the fourteen hundred maledic tions which comprised their wisdom, and these were learned by the Philosophers who thus became even wiser than before. In due process of time two children were born of these marriages. They were born on the same day and in the same hour, and' they were only different in this, that one of them was a boy and the other one was a girl. Nobody was able to tell how this had happened and, for the first time in their lives, the Philosophers were forced to ad mire an event which they had been unable to prognosticate; but having proved by many different methods that the children were really children, that what must be must be, that a fact cannot be controverted.