saw her husband returning home, so she
slipped quietly behind him and gave him a hearty kiss. The husband was
annoyed, and said she offended all propriety. "Pardon! pardon!" said
she. "I did not know it was you." Thus the excuse may sometimes be worse
than the offence. There is exquisite humour in the following
noodle-story: Two brothers were tilling the ground together. The elder,
having prepared dinner, called his brother, who replied in a loud voice,
"Wait till I have hidden my spade, and I shall at once be with you."
When he joined his elder brother, the latter mildly reproached him,
saying, "When one hides anything, one should keep silence, or at least
should not cry aloud about it, for it lays one open to be robbed."
Dinner over, the younger went back to the field, and looked for his
spade, but could not find it; so he ran to his brother and
_whispered_ mysteriously in his ear, "My spade is stolen!"--The
passion for collecting antique relics is thus ridiculed: A man who was
fond of old curiosities, though he knew not the true from the false,
expended all his wealth in purchasing mere imitations of the
lightning-stick of Tchew-Koung, a glazed cup of the time of the Emperor
Cheun, and the mat of Confucius; and being reduced to beggary, he
carried these spurious relics about with him, and said to the people in
the streets, "Sirs, I pray you, give me some coins struck by Tai-Koung."

* * * * *

Indian fiction abounds in stories of simpletons, and probably the oldest
extant drolleries of the Gothamite type are found in the _Jatakas_,
or Buddhist Birth-stories. Assuredly they were own brothers to our mad
men of Gotham, the Indian villagers who, being pestered by mosquitoes
when at work in the forest, bravely resolved, according to _Jataka_
44, to take their bows and arrows and other weapons and make war upon
the troublesome insects until they had shot dead or cut in pieces every
one; but in trying to shoot the mosquitoes they only shot, struck, and
injured one another. And nothing more foolish is recorded of the
Schildburgers than Somadeva relates, in his _Katha Sarit Sagara_,
of the simpletons who cut down the palm-trees: Being required to furnish
the king with a certain quantity of dates, and perceiving that it was
very easy to gather the dates of a palm which had fallen down of itself,
they set to work and cut down all the date-palms in their village, and
having gathered from them the