e of too
much talking.

"Now as surely as that time and straw ripen medlars, as the saying is,
just so surely will it come to pass that a woman will tell a secret, even
to her own shame. And so it befell this lady, who told it as a great
mystery to her mother, who at once imparted it under oath to all her dear
friends, who swore all their friends on all their salvations not to
breathe a word of it to anybody, who all confessed it to the priests.
How much farther it went God knows, but by the time the whole town knew
it, which was in one day of twenty-four hours, or ere the next morning,
the bride had become a frog who lived in the spring, and the bridegroom a
boar who every day went to drink at the water, and when there said:

"'Lady Frog! lo, I am here!
He to whom thou once wert dear.
We are in this sad condition,
Not by avarice or ambition,
Nor by evil or by wrong,
But 'cause thou could'st not hold thy tongue;
For be she shallow, be she deep,
No woman can a secret keep;
Which all should think upon who see
The monument which here will be.'

"So it came to pass either that the boar turned into the great bronze
_maiale_ which now stands in the market-place, or else the people raised
it in remembrance of the story--_chi sa_--but there it is to this day.

"As for the Signora Frog, she comforted herself by making a great noise
and telling the tale at the top of her voice, having her brains in her
tongue--_il cervello nella lingua_, as they say of those who talk well
yet have but small sense. And that which you hear frogs croaking all
night long is nothing but this story which I have told you of their
ancestress and the bronze boar."

* * * * *

This is, in one form or the other, a widely spread tale. As the voice of
the frog has a strange resemblance to that of man, there being legends
referring to it in every language, and as there is a bold and forward
expression in its eyes, {50} it was anciently regarded as a human being
who was metamorphosed for being too impudent and loquacious, as appears
by the legend of "Latona and the Lycian Boors" (Ovid, _Metamorph._, vi.
340). The general resemblance of the form of a frog to that of man
greatly contributed to create such fables.

The classic ancient original of this boar may be seen in the Uffizzi
Gallery. As the small image of a pig carried by ladies ensures that they
will soon be, as the G