t little. Are then at this time of the year the
revolutions of the heavens, the constellations of the firmament and
aspects of the planets such that whosoever shall lose a hatchet,
shall immediately grow rich? Ha, ha, ha! by Jove you shall even be
lost and it please you, my dear hatchet! With this they all fairly
lost their hatchets out of hand. The devil of a one that had a
hatchet left; he was not his mother's son that did not lose his
hatchet. No more was wood felled or cleared in that country,
through want of hatchets. Nay, the Aesopian apologue even saith,
that certain petty country gents of the lower class who had sold
the Woodman their little mill and little field to have wherewithal
to make a figure at the next muster, having been told that his
treasure was come to him by this only means, sold the only badge of
their gentility, their swords, to purchase hatchets to go lose
them, as the silly clodpates did, in hopes to gain store of chink
by that loss.

'You would have truly sworn they had been a parcel of your petty
spiritual usurers, Rome-bound, selling their all, and borrowing of
others to buy store of mandates,--a penny-worth of a new-made pope.

'Now they cried out and brayed, and prayed and bawled, and invoked
Jupiter: 'My hatchet! my hatchet! Jupiter, my hatchet! on this
side, my hatchet! on that side, my hatchet! ho, ho, ho, ho,
Jupiter, my hatchet!' The air round about rung with the cries and
howlings of these rascally losers of hatchets.

'Mercury was nimble in bringing them hatchets; to each offering
that which he had lost, as also another of gold, and a third of
silver.

'Every _he_ was still for that of gold, giving thanks in abundance
to the great giver Jupiter; but in the very nick of time, that they
bowed and stooped to take it from the ground, whip, in a trice,
Mercury chopped off their heads, as Jupiter had commanded; and of
heads thus cut off the number was just equal to that of the lost
hatchets.'

This is but a small portion of the fable as amplified by Rabelais; but
what is cited illustrates the _accretive_ power of a jest when it
involves a principle of general application. The same idea--that of
roguery rewarded according to the letter--is involved in an anecdote,
which tells us that a certain alchemist having dedicated to Pope