The celebrated teacher Rabbi Meir sat during the whole of the Sabbath day in the public school instructing the people.  During his absence from the house his two sons died, both of them of uncommon beauty, and enlightened in the law.  His wife bore them to her bed-chamber, laid them upon the marriage-bed, and spread a white covering over their bodies.  In the evening the Rabbi Meir came home.  “Where are my two sons,” he asked, “that I may give them my blessing?  I repeatedly looked round the school, and I did not see them there.”  She reached him a goblet.  He praised the Lord at the going out of the Sabbath, drank, and again asked:  “Where are my sons, that they too may drink of the cup of blessing?” “They will not be afar off,” she said, and placed food before him that he might eat.  He was in a gladsome and genial mood, and when he had said grace after the meal, she thus addressed him:  “Rabbi, with thy permission, I would fain propose to thee one question.”  “Ask it then, my love,” he replied.  “A few days ago a person entrusted some jewels into my custody, and now he demands them of me; should I give them back again?” “This is a question,” said the Rabbi, “which my wife should not have thought it necessary to ask.  What! wouldst thou hesitate or be reluctant to restore to every one his own?” “No,” she replied; “but yet I thought it best not to restore them without acquainting you therewith.”  She then led him to the chamber, and, stepping to the bed, took the white covering from the dead bodies.  “Ah, my sons—­my sons!” thus loudly lamented the father.  “My sons! the light of my eyes, and the light of my understanding!  I was your father, but ye were my teachers in the law.”  The mother turned away and wept bitterly.  At length she took her husband by the hand, and said:  “Rabbi, didst thou not teach me that we must not be reluctant to restore that which was entrusted to our keeping?  See—­’the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!’"[83] “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” echoed Rabbi Meir.  “And blessed be his name for thy sake too, for well is it written:  ’Whoso hath found a virtuous wife, hath a greater prize than rubies; she openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.’"[84]

   [82] The Friend, ed. 1850, vol. ii, p. 247.

   [83] Book of Job, i, 21.

   [84] Prov. xxxi, 10, 26.

* * * * *

The originals of not a few of the early Italian tales are found in the Talmud—­the author of the Cento Novelle Antiche, Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and other novelists having derived the groundwork of many of their fictions from the Gesta Romanorum and the Disciplina Clericalis of Peter Alfonsus, which are largely composed of tales drawn from Eastern sources.  The 123rd novel of Sacchetti, in which a young man carves a capon in a whimsical fashion, finds its original in the following Talmudic story: