boy, what dost thou see?  Speak!” and he too went over all that the boy had gone over.  Then the turn came to the boy, and he chanted, “O master, a spark has fallen on thy turban, and it is burning.”  The master straightway tore off his turban and cast it on the ground, and saw that it was burning.  He blew out the fire on this side and on that, and took it in his hand, and said to the boy, “What time for chanting is this?  Everything is good in its own place,” and he admonished him.[16]

The other story tells how a king had a stupid son, and placed him in charge of a cunning master, learned in the sciences, who declared it would be easy for him to teach the boy discretion, and, before dismissing him, the king gave the sage many rich gifts.  After the boy has been long under the tuition of his learned master, the latter, conceiving him to be well versed in all the sciences, takes him to the king, his father, who says to him, “O my son, were I to hold a certain thing hidden in my hand, couldst thou tell me what it is?” “Yes,” answers the youth.  Upon this the king secretly slips the ring off his finger, and hides it in his hand, and then asks the boy, “What have I in my hand?” Quoth the clever youth, “O father, it first came from the hills.” (The king thinks to himself, “He knows that mines are in the hills.”) “And it is a round thing,” continues he—­“it must be a millstone.”  “Blockhead!” exclaims the irate king, “could a millstone be hidden in a man’s hand?” Then addressing the learned man, “Take him away,” he says, “and teach him.”

Lastly, we have a somewhat different specimen of the silly son in the doctor’s apprentice, whose attempt to imitate his master was so ludicrously unsuccessful.  He used to accompany his master on his visits to patients, and one day the doctor said to a sick man, to whom he had been called, “I know what is the matter with you, and it is useless to deny it;—­you have been eating beans.”  On their way home, the apprentice, admiring his master’s sagacity, begged to be informed how he knew that the patient had been eating beans.  “Boy,” said the doctor, loftily, “I drew an inference.”  “An inference!” echoed this youth of inquiring mind; “and what is an inference?” Quoth the doctor, “Listen:  when we came to the door, I observed the shells of beans lying about, and I drew the inference that the family had had beans for dinner.”  Another day it chanced that the doctor did not take his apprentice with him when he went his rounds, and in his absence a message came for him to visit a person who had been taken suddenly ill.  “Here,” thought the apprentice, “is a chance for my putting master’s last lesson into practice;” so off he went to the sick man, and assuming as “knowing” an air as he could, he felt his pulse, and then said to him severely, “Don’t deny it; I see by your pulse that you have been eating a horse.  I shall send you some medicine.”  When the doctor returned home he inquired of his hopeful pupil,