A number of the Gothamite tales in the printed collection are not only
inferior to those which are preserved orally, but can be considered in
no sense examples of preeminent folly. Three consist of tricks played by
women upon their husbands, such as are found in the ordinary jest-books
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 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.
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