have been more
ready with them than with repartees."

The story of the famous riddle of the Sphinx comes down from Greek
mythology. The city of Thebes was infested by a monster having the
body of a lion and the upper part of a woman. She lay crouching upon
a rock near a narrow pass which led to the city, and propounded to
all travelers a riddle, allowing all who guessed to pass safely, but
killing all who failed. The uniform failure of all who came, and
their subsequent slaughter, made great lamentation in the city.
Oedipus, the unacknowledged son of the King of Thebes, who had
shortly before unknowingly killed his father, undertook to rid the
city of the monster. He boldly confronted the Sphinx, who asked him
the riddle, "What animal is it that in the morning goes on four feet,
at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Oedipus replied,
"Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks
erect, and in old age goes with the aid of a staff."[1] The Sphinx
thereupon cast herself from the rock and perished, and the Thebans
made Oedipus king.

[1] See Gayley's "Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art"
(Boston, Ginn and Company, 1911).

There is one age-old riddle, still current in Brittany, Germany, and
Gascony, about which the tradition hovers that Homer died with
vexation at not being able to discover the answer. It is, "What we
caught we threw away, what we could not catch we kept."

Early folklore riddles dealt with natural phenomena. With the Wolofs
the riddle of the wind asks, "What flies forever and rests never?"
The Teutonic form was, "What can go in the face of the sun, yet leave
no shadow?" The Basutos of South Africa ask: "What is wingless and
legless, yet flies fast and cannot be imprisoned?" and answer, "The
voice."

The oldest English riddles extant are among the fragments found in
"The Exeter Book." These date back to the eighth century and were
written in Northumbria. While these are not conundrums in the modern
sense, they are very elaborate studies of analogy, and contain some
of the most imaginative of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

In the early half of the seventeenth century there were published
several small books, which contain the sources of many of the
conundrums of the present day. These books have been brought together
by W. Carew Hazlitt, under the title "Shakespeare's Jest-Books"
(London, 1864). The dates of these books are variously 1600, 1630,
1636, and 1639. The fo