In one a man, who had taken
a buzzard, invites some friends to dine with him. His wife, with two of
her gossips, having secretly eaten the buzzard, kills and cooks an old
goose, and sets it before him and his guests; the latter call him a
knave to mock them thus with an old goose, and go off in great anger.
The husband, resolved to put himself right with his friends, stuffs the
buzzard's feathers into a sack, in order to show them that they were
mistaken in thinking he had tried to deceive them with an old goose
instead of a fine fat buzzard. But before he started on this business,
his wife contrived to substitute the goose's feathers, which he
exhibited to his friends as those of the buzzard, and was soundly
cudgelled for what they believed to be a second attempt to mock them.--
Two other stories seem to be derived from the Italian novelists: of the
man who intended cutting off his wife's hair[8] and of the man who
defied his wife to cuckold him. Two others turn upon wrong responses at
a christening and a marriage, which have certainly nothing Gothamite in
them. Another is a dull story of a Scotchman who employed a carver to
make him as a sign of his inn a boar's head, the tradesman supposing
from his northern pronunciation that he meant _bare_ head.--In the
nineteenth tale, a party of gossips are assembled at the alehouse, and
each relates in what manner she is profitable to her husband: one saves
candles by sending all her household to bed in daylight; another, like
the old fellow and Tib his wife in _Jolly Good Ale and Old_, eats
little meat, but can swig a gallon or two of ale, and so forth.

We have, however, our Gothamite once more in the story of him who,
seeing a fine cheese on the ground as he rode along the highway, tried
to pick it up with his sword, and finding his sword too short, rode back
to fetch a longer one for his purpose, but when he returned, he found
the cheese was gone. "A murrain take it!" quoth he. "If I had had this
sword, I had had this cheese myself, and now another hath got it!" Also
in the smith who took a red-hot iron bar and thrust it into the thatch
of his smithy to destroy a colony of wasps, and, of course, burned down
the smithy--a story which has done duty in modern days to "point a
moral" in the form of a teetotal tract, with a drunken smith in place of
the honest Gothamite![9]

The following properly belongs to stories of the "silly son" class:
There was a young man of Gotham the