Clever Elsie's Imaginary Disaster

A young woman named Elsie, considered clever by her parents though the description would soon prove badly mistaken, was sent down to the cellar one afternoon to draw beer for a family gathering. As she filled the jug, she happened to glance up and notice an old pickaxe hanging on the wall directly above where she stood, left there by a mason years before.

Elsie's mind wandered immediately to an elaborate, entirely imagined future: if she married and had a child, and that child grew old enough to be sent to this very cellar for beer, and the ancient pickaxe happened to fall at exactly that moment, it might strike and kill her future, currently nonexistent child. Overcome with grief for a tragedy that had not happened, could not yet happen, and involved a person who did not exist, she sat down on the cellar floor and wept bitterly.

Upstairs, when she failed to return, her mother came looking and found her sobbing beside the beer barrel; upon hearing the reason, the mother sat down and wept too, moved by the same imagined catastrophe. Her father came next, and did the same, and by the time Elsie's bewildered suitor arrived searching for his missing bride-to-be, he found the entire household in tears over a danger to a grandchild none of them had yet, from a pickaxe that had hung safely on that wall for twenty years without incident. He alone kept his sense, removed the pickaxe himself to end the matter, and the tale traveled far as a caution against grieving so completely over disasters that exist nowhere except in a worried imagination.