His ass-ship listened thus far with reluctance to the admonition of his friend, without intending to profit by it; but arose from the carpet of spinach, eyed his companion with a mortifying glance of contempt, pricked up his long snaky ears, and began to put himself into a musical posture.  The nimble, small-hoofed elk, perceiving this, said to himself:  “Since he has stretched out his neck and prepared his pitch-pipe, he will not remain long without singing.”  So he left the vegetable banquet, leaped over the garden wall, and fled to a place of security.  The ass was no sooner alone than he commenced a most loud and horrible braying, which instantly awoke the gardeners, who, with the noose of an insidious halter, to the trunk of a tree fast bound the affrighted musician, where they belaboured him with their cudgels till they broke every bone in his body, and converted his skin to a book, in which, in letters of gold, a munshi [learned man] of luminous pen, with the choicest flowers of the garden of rhetoric, and for the benefit of the numerous fraternity of asses, inscribed this instructive history.

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Magical articles such as the wonderful wishing-bowl of our unlucky friend the Faggot-maker figure very frequently in the folk-tales of almost every country, assuming many different forms:  a table-cloth, a pair of saddle-bags, a purse, a flask, etc.; but since a comprehensive account of those highly-gifted objects—­alas, that they should no longer exist!—­is furnished in the early chapters of my Popular Tales and Fictions, I presume I need not go over the same wide field again.—­In the Katha Sarit Sagara (Ocean of the Streams of Story), a very large collection of tales and apologues, composed, in Sanskrit, by Somadeva, in the 12th century, after a much older work, the Vrihat Katha (or Great Story), the tale of the Faggot-maker occurs as a separate recital.  It is there an inexhaustible pitcher which he receives from four yakshas—­supernatural beings, who correspond to some extent with the peris of Muslim mythology—­and he is duly warned that should it be broken it departs at once.  For a time he concealed the secret from his relations until one day, when he was intoxicated, they asked him how it came about that he had given up carrying burdens, and had abundance of all kinds of dainties, eatable and drinkable.  “He was too much puffed up with pride to tell them plainly, but, taking the wish-granting pitcher on his shoulder, he began to dance; and, as he was dancing, the inexhaustible pitcher slipped from his shoulder, as his feet tripped with over-abundance of intoxication, and, falling on the ground, was broken in pieces.  And immediately it was mended again, and reverted to its original possessor; but Subadatta was reduced to his former condition, and filled with despondency.”  In a note to this story, Mr. Tawney remarks that in Bartsch’s Meklenburg Tales a man possesses himself of an inexhaustible beer-can, but as soon as he tells how he got it the beer disappears.—­The story of the Foolish Thieves noisily carousing in the house they had just plundered occurs also in Saadi’s Gulistan and several other Eastern story-books.