Water Poet, probably heard it told,
in some river-side tavern, amidst the clinking of beer-cans and the
fragrant clouds blown from pipes of Trinidado, and "put it in his book!"
How it came into England it would be interesting to ascertain. It may
have been brought to Europe by the Venetian merchants, who traded
largely in the Levant and with the Moors in Northern Africa.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Powell and Magnusson's _Legends of Iceland_, Second Series, p.
626.

[2] _Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and Sayings_. Explained and
illustrated from the rich and interesting folk-lore of the Valley. By
the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles. Bombay: 1885.

[3] This work was composed A.H. 776 (A.D. 1374-5), as the anonymous
author takes care to inform us in his opening verses.

[4] A still older form of the story occurs in the _Pancha Tantra_
(Five Sections), a Sanskrit version of the celebrated Fables of Bidpai,
in which a gluttonous ram is in the habit of going to the king's kitchen
and devouring all food within his reach. One of the cooks beat him with
a burning log of wood, and the ram rushed off with his blazing fleece
and set the horses' stables on fire, and so forth. The story is most
probably of Buddhist extraction.

[5] A Sinhalese variant of the exploit of the man of Norfolk and of the
man of Gotham with the sack of meal. "See _ante_, p. 19." [Transcriber's
note: this approximates to the text reference for Chapter II
Footnote 1 in this etext.]

[6] Mr. C.J.R. le Mesurier in _The Orientalist_ (Kandy, Ceylon:
1884), pp. 233-4.

[7] _The Orientalist_, 1884, p. 234. A much fuller version, with
subsequent incidents, is given in the same excellent periodical, pp.
36-38.

[8] Archie Armstrong was Court jester to James I. of England. It is
needless, perhaps, to say that he had no hand in this book of facetiae,
which is composed for the most part of jests taken out of earlier
collections.

CHAPTER IV.

GOTHAMITE DROLLERIES _(continued)._

Tales of sharpers' tricks upon simpletons do not quite fall within the
scope of the present series of papers, but there is one, in the
_Arabian Nights_--not found, however, in our common English version
of that fascinating story-book--which deserves a place among
noodle-stories, since it is so diverting, is not very generally known,
and is probably the original of the early Italian novel of the _Monk
Transformed_, which is ascribed to Michele Colombo:

A rustic simpleton was walking