The following jest is spread—­mutatis mutandis—­over all Europe:  A pedant, a bald man, and a barber, making a journey in company, agreed to watch in turn during the night.  It was the barber’s watch first.  He propped up the sleeping pedant, and shaved his head, and when his time came, awoke him.  When the pedant felt his head bare, “What a fool is this barber,” he cried, “for he has roused the bald man instead of me!”

A variant of this story is related of a raw Highlander, fresh from the heather, who put up at an inn in Perth, and shared his bed with a negro.  Some coffee-room jokers having blackened his face during the night, when he was called, as he had desired, very early next morning, and got up, he saw the reflection of his face in the mirror, and exclaimed in a rage, “Tuts, tuts!  The silly body has waukened the wrang man.”

In connection with these two stories may be cited the following, from a Persian jest-book:  A poor wrestler, who had passed all his life in forests, resolved to try his fortune in a great city, and as he drew near it he observed with wonder the crowds on the road, and thought, “I shall certainly not be able to know myself among so many people if I have not something about me that the others have not.”  So he tied a pumpkin to his right leg and, thus decorated, entered the town.  A young wag, perceiving the simpleton, made friends with him, and induced him to spend the night at his house.  While he was asleep, the joker removed the pumpkin from his leg and tied it to his own, and then lay down again.  In the morning, when the poor fellow awoke and found the pumpkin on his companion’s leg, he called to him, “Hey! get up, for I am perplexed in my mind.  Who am I, and who are you?  If I am myself, why is the pumpkin on your leg?  And if you are yourself, why is the pumpkin not on my leg?”

Modern counterparts of the following jest are not far to seek:  Quoth a man to a pedant, “The slave I bought of you has died.”  Rejoined the other, “By the gods, I do assure you that he never once played me such a trick while I had him.”  The old Greek pedant is transformed into an Irishman, in our collections of facetiae, who applied to a farmer for work.  “I’ll have nothing to do with you,” said the farmer, “for the last five Irishmen I had all died on my hands.”  Quoth Pat, “Sure, sir, I can bring you characters from half a dozen gentlemen I’ve worked for that I never did such a thing.”  And the jest is thus told in an old translation of Les Contes Facetieux de Sieur Gaulard:  “Speaking of one of his Horses which broake his Neck at the descent of a Rock, he said, Truly it was one of the handsomest and best Curtails in all the Country; he neuer shewed me such a trick before in all his life."[1]