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.  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]