The Three Sillies

Olive Beaupre Miller The Treasure Chest of My Bookhouse (Chicago: The Bookhouse for Children, 1920)IV:81

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The book of Proverbs is full of wisdom.  I have often told people that if all of us just tried to live by the teachings in Proverbs we would have a good life.

Sometimes I wonder how the Lord puts up with all the silliness going on in the world today.  It almost seems that sanity has completely been thrown out the window with the bath water!  I don't listen to the news, but if I did I would feel like flinging myself out that same window just to escape all the silliness around me.  Occasionally someone will tell me something they heard on the news and my reply is usually, "Just when I don't think it can get any sillier, it does."

I could get on a bandwagon here and start naming all the silliness, but instead will tell you a story.  It's called The Three Sillies.

ONCE UPON A TIME there lived a farmer, his wife and his daughter.  A stranger happened to wander by and was invited to stay and eat.  He accepted and because the daughter was very beautiful, he said to himself, "this girl is very beautiful.  I will try and make her my wife."

The Mother was fixing supper and asked the daughter to go into the basement and bring up some cider that they had stored in a big keg in the basement.  The daughter was gone for a long time, so the Mother told the Daddy to go down and check on her.

The Daddy stayed a long time as well, so the Mother told the young man she would go check on them.  After awhile when none of them came back, the young man decided he would go down and check.

All three were sitting beside the keg of cider crying.  Overhead in the ceiling was a hatchet buried in the wood.  The young man asked the daughter why she was crying.  She told him that when she came down to get the cider and saw the hatchet buried in the ceiling, she got to thinking...what if that hatchet fell while she was drawing the cider, and what if it hit her in the head, and what if it killed her and what if she never fell in love and married!  What a horrible thing that would be.

He asked the Daddy why he was crying.  He said the same thing.  What if his daughter came down to get the cider and the hatchet fell on her and killed her and she never got married and never had any grandchildren for him.

Well....so it goes.  You probably know what the Mother said.

The young man left there very sorrowful and said that he had never met any sillier people than these three.  He said that if he did, he would come back and marry the girl.

Now, in my opinion, in the time we are living in, he would have had no trouble finding sillier people than those three!  In fact, he probably would not have journeyed even a day away before he encountered silliness to make their silliness look pretty intelligent!    Proverbs 13: 16 says (in the Message Bible) "A commonsense person lives good sense;  fools litter the country with silliness."