the meantime taken the linen.
Finding it gone, "It's all right," says he to himself; "she's taken it,"
then aloud, "Where's the money I told you to have ready?" The statue
remained silent. "If you don't give me the money, I'll hit you on the
head," he exclaimed, and raising his stick, he knocked the head off, and
found it filled with gold coin. "That's where you keep your money, is
it? All right; I can pay myself." So saying, he filled his pockets with
the coin and went home. When he handed his mother the money, and told
her of his adventure with the quiet body by the roadside, she was afraid
lest the neighbours should learn of her windfall if the booby knew its
value, so she said to him, "You've only brought me a lot of rusty nails;
but never mind: you'll know better what to do next time," and put the
money in an earthen jar. In her absence, a ragman comes to the house,
and the booby asks him, "Will you buy some rusty nails?" The man desires
to see them. "Well," quoth he on beholding the treasure, "they're not
much worth, but I'll give you twelve pauls for the lot," and having
handed over the sum, went off with his prize. When his mother comes
home, the booby tells her what a bargain he had made for the rusty
nails. "Nails!" she echoes, in consternation. "Why, you foolish thing,
they were gold coins!" "Can't help that now, mamma," he answers
philosophically; "you told me they were old rusty nails." By another
lucky adventure, however, the booby is enabled to make up his mother's
loss, finding a treasure which a party of robbers had left behind them
at the foot of a tree.

The incident of a simpleton selling something to an inanimate object and
discovering a hidden treasure occurs, in different forms, in the
folk-tales of Asiatic as well as European countries. In a manuscript
text of the _Arabian Nights_, brought from Constantinople by
Wortley Montague, and now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, a
more elaborate version of the Italian booby's adventure with the statue
is found, in the "Story of the Bang-eater and his Wife:"

In former times there lived not far from Baghdad a half-witted fellow,
who was much addicted to the use of bang. Being reduced to poverty, he
was obliged to sell his cow, which he took to the market one day, but
the animal being in such a poor condition, no one would buy it, and
after waiting till he was weary he returned homeward. On the way he
stopped to repose himself under a tree, and t