A friend one day told M. Gaulard that the Dean of Besancon was dead.  “Believe it not,” said he; “for had it been so he would have told me himself, since he writes to me about everything.”

M. Gaulard asked his secretary one evening what hour it was.  “Sir,” replied the secretary, “I cannot tell you by the dial, because the sun is set.”  “Well,” quoth M. Gaulard, “and can you not see by the candle?”

On another occasion the Sieur called from his bed to a servant desiring him to see if it was daylight yet.  “There is no sign of daylight,” said the servant.  “I do not wonder,” rejoined the Sieur, “that thou canst not see day, great fool as thou art.  Take a candle and look with it out at the window, and thou shalt see whether it be day or not.”

In a strange house, the Sieur found the walls of his bedchamber full of great holes.  “This,” exclaimed he in a rage, “is the cursedest chamber in all the world.  One may see day all the night through.”

Travelling in the country, his man, to gain the fairest way, rode through a field sowed with pease, upon which M. Gaulard cried to him, “Thou knave, wilt thou burn my horse’s feet?  Dost thou not know that about six weeks ago I burned my mouth with eating pease, they were so hot?”

A poor man complained to him that he had had a horse stolen from him.  “Why did you not mark his visage,” asked M. Gaulard, “and the clothes he wore?” “Sir,” said the man, “I was not there when he was stolen.”  Quoth the Sieur, “You should have left somebody to ask him his name, and in what place he resided.”

M. Gaulard felt the sun so hot in the midst of a field at noontide in August that he asked of those about him, “What means the sun to be so hot?  How should it not keep its heat till winter, when it is cold weather?”

A proctor, discoursing with M. Gaulard, told him that a dumb, deaf, or blind man could not make a will but with certain additional forms.  “I pray you,” said the Sieur, “give me that in writing, that I may send it to a cousin of mine who is lame.”

One day a friend visited the Sieur and found him asleep in his chair.  “I slept,” said he, “only to avoid idleness; for I must always be doing something.”

The Abbe of Poupet complained to him that the moles had spoiled a fine meadow, and he could find no remedy for them.  “Why, cousin,” said M. Gaulard, “it is but paving your meadow, and the moles will no more trouble you.”

M. Gaulard had a lackey belonging to Auvergne, who robbed him of twelve crowns and ran away, at which he was very angry, and said he would have nothing that came from that country.  So he ordered all that was from Auvergne to be cast out of the house, even his mule; and to make the animal more ashamed, he caused his servants to take off its shoes and its saddle and bridle.

* * * * *

Although Taylor’s Wit and Mirth is the most “original” of our old English jest-books—­that is to say, it contains very few stories in common with preceding collections—­yet some of the diverting tales he relates are traceable to very distant sources, more especially the following: