There once dwelt in Florence a noodle called Nigniaca, upon whom a party of young men resolved to play a practical joke.  Having arranged their plans, one of them met him early one morning, and asked him if he was not ill.  “No,” says the wittol.  “I am well enough.”  “By my faith,” quoth the joker, “but you have a pale, sickly colour,” and went his way.  Presently a second of the complotters came up to him, and asked him if he was not suffering from an ague, for he certainly looked very ill.  The poor fellow now began to think that he was really sick, and was convinced of this when a third man in passing told him that he should be in his bed—­he had evidently not an hour to live.  Hearing this, Nigniaca stood stock-still, saying to himself, “Verily, I have some sharp ague,” when a fourth man came and bade him go home at once, for he was a dying man.  So the simpleton begged this fourth man to help him home, which he did very willingly, and after laying him in his bed, the other jokers came to see him, and one of them, pretending to be a physician, felt his pulse and declared the patient would die within an hour.[13] Then, standing all about his bed, they said to each other, “Now he is sinking fast; his speech and sight have failed him; he will soon give up the ghost.  Let us therefore close his eyes, cross his hands on his breast, and carry him forth to be buried.”  The simpleton lay as still as though he was really dead, so they laid him on a bier and carried him through the city.  A great crowd soon gathered, when it was known that they were carrying the corpse of Nigniaca to his grave.  And among the crowd was a taverner’s boy, who cried out, “What a rascal and thief is dead!  By the mass, he should have been hanged long ago.”  When the wittol heard himself thus vilified, he lifted up his head and exclaimed, “I wish, you scoundrel, I were alive now, as I am dead, and I would prove thee a false liar to thy face;” upon which the jokers burst into laughter, set down the “body” and ran away—­leaving Nigniaca to explain the whole affair to the marvelling multitude.[14]

We read of another silly son, in the Katha Manjari, whose father said to him one day, “My boy, you are now grown big, yet you don’t seem to have much sense.  You must, however, do something for your living.  Go, therefore, to the tank, and catch fish and bring them home.”  The lad accordingly went to the tank, and having caused all the water—­which was required for the irrigation of his father’s fields—­to run to waste, he picked up from the mud all the fishes he could find, and took them to his father, not a little proud of his exploit.—­In the Katha Sarit Sagara it is related that a Brahman told his foolish son one evening that he must send him to the village early on the morrow, and thither the lad went, without asking what he was to do.  Returning home at night very tired, he said to his father, “I have been to the village.”  “Yes,” said the Brahman, “you went thither without an object,