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 which should go wooing to a fair
maid.
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