ef hastily descended from the
tree. "Why were you up that tree?" asked the gardener. The thief
replied, "My brother, I went up to gather grass for my calf." "Ha! ha!
is there grass, then, on a cocoa-nut tree?" said the gardener. "No,"
quoth the thief; "but I did not know; therefore I came down again."--And
we have a variant of this in the Turkish jest of the fellow who went
into a garden and pulled up carrots, turnips, and other kinds of
vegetables, some of which he put into a sack, and some into his bosom.
The gardener, coming suddenly on the spot, laid hold of him, and said,
"What are you seeking here?" The simpleton replied, "For some days past
a great wind has been blowing, and that wind blew me hither." "But who
pulled up these vegetables?" "As the wind blew very violently, it cast
me here and there; and whatever I laid hold of in the hope of saving
myself remained in my hands." "Ah," said the gardener, "but who filled
this sack with them?" "Well, that is the very question I was about to
ask myself when you came up."

The propensity with which Irishmen are credited of making ludicrous
bulls is said to have its origin, not from any lack of intelligence, but
rather in the fancy of that lively race, which often does not wait for
expression until the ideas have taken proper verbal form. Be this as it
may, a considerable portion of the bulls popularly ascribed to Irishmen
are certainly "old as the jests of Hierokles," and are, moreover,
current throughout Europe. Thus in Hierokles we read that one of
twin-brothers having recently died, a pedant, meeting the survivor,
asked him whether it was he or his brother who had deceased.--Taylor has
this in his _Wit and Mirth_, and he probably heard it from some one
who had read the facetious tales of the Sieur Gaulard: "A nobleman of
France (as he was riding) met with a yeoman of the Country, to whom he
said, My friend, I should know thee. I doe remember I haue often seene
thee. My good Lord, said the countriman, I am one of your Honers poore
tenants, and my name is T.J. I remember better now (said my Lord); there
were two brothers of you, but one is dead; I pray, which of you doth
remaine alive?"--Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in the notes to his edition of
Taylor's collection _(Shakespeare Jest Books_, Third Series), cites
a Scotch parallel from _The Laird of Logan_: "As the Paisley
steamer came alongside the quay[3] at the city of the Seestus,[4] a
denizen of St. Mirren's hailed one o