begged the judge to spare the goldsmith’s life; “for,” said they, “he is very sick and ill-favoured, and would not make at all a pretty spectacle.”  “But,” said the judge, “somebody must be hanged.”  Then they drew the attention of the court to the fact that there was a fat Moorman in a shop opposite, who was a much fitter subject for an execution, and asked that he might be hanged in the goldsmith’s stead.  The learned judge, considering that this arrangement would be very satisfactory, gave judgment accordingly.

If some of the last-cited stories are not precisely Gothamite drolleries, though all are droll enough in their way, there can be no doubt whatever that we have a Sinhalese brother to the men of Gotham in the following:  A villager in Ceylon, whose calf had got its head into a pot and could not get it out again, sent for a friend, celebrated for his wisdom, to release the poor animal.  The sagacious friend, taking in the situation at a glance, cut off the calf’s head, broke the pot, and then delivered the head to the owner of the calf, saying, “What will you do when I am dead and gone?”—­And we have another Gothamite in the Kashmiri who bought as much rice as he thought would suffice for a year’s food, and finding he had only enough for eleven months, concluded it was better to fast the other month right off, which he did accordingly; but he died just before the month was completed, leaving eleven months’ rice in his house.

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The typical noodle of the Turks, the Khoja Nasru-’d-Din, is said to have been a subject of the independent prince of Karaman, at whose capital, Konya, he resided, and he is represented as a contemporary of Timur (Tamerlane), in the middle of the fourteenth century.  The pleasantries which are ascribed to him are for the most part common to all countries, but some are probably of genuine Turkish origin.  To cite a few specimens:  The Khoja’s wife said to him one day, “Make me a present of a kerchief of red Yemen silk, to put on my head.”  The Khoja stretched out his arms and said, “Like that?  Is that large enough?” On her replying in the affirmative he ran off to the bazaar, with his arms still stretched out, and meeting a man on the road, he bawled to him, “Look where you are going, O man, or you will cause me to lose my measure!”

Another day the Khoja’s wife washed his caftan and spread it upon a tree in the garden of the house.  That night the Khoja goes out, and thinks he sees in the moonlight a man motionless upon a tree in the garden.  “Give me my bow and arrows,” said he to his wife, and having received them, he shot the caftan, piercing it through and through, and then returned into the house.  Next morning, when he discovered that it was his own caftan he had shot at, he exclaimed, “By Allah, had I happened to be in it, I should have killed myself!”