yet can I be suffered to see them plucked, and stand and choose them by day, but am fain by night to take one at adventure.  And when I come home, I am fain to do the labour to pluck it myself too.  Yet, for all this, though it be but lean and, I know, not well worth a groat, it serveth me sometimes both for dinner and for supper too.  As for the fact that you live of ravine, I can find no fault in that.  You have used it so long that I think you can do no otherwise, and therefore it would be folly to forbid it to you—­and, to say the truth, against good conscience too.  For live you must, I know, and other craft know you none, and therefore, as reason is, must you live by that.  But yet, you know, too much is too much, and measure is a merry mean, which I perceive by your shrift you have never used to keep.  And therefore surely this shall be your penance, that you shall all this year never pass the price of sixpence at a meal, as near as your conscience can guess the price.”

Their shrift have I told you, as Mother Maud told it to us.  But now serveth for our matter the conscience of them both in the true performing of their penance.  The poor ass after his shrift, when he waxed an-hungered, saw a sow lie with her pigs, well lapped in new straw.  And he drew near and thought to have eaten of the straw, but anon his scrupulous conscience began therein to grudge him.  For since his penance was that, for greediness of his good, he should do nobody else any harm, he thought he might not eat one straw there lest, for lack of that straw, some of those pigs might hap to die for cold.  So he held still his hunger until someone brought him food.  But when he was about to fall to it, then fell he yet into a far further scruple.  For then it came in his mind that he should yet break his penance if he should eat any of that either, since he was commanded by his ghostly father that he should not, for his own food, hinder any other beast.  For he thought that if he ate not that food, some other beast might hap to have it.  And so should he, by the eating of it, peradventure hinder another.  And thus stayed he still fasting till, when he told the cause, his ghostly father came and informed him better, and then he cast off that scruple and fell mannerly to his meal, and was a right honest ass many a fair day after.

The wolf now, coming from shrift clean absolved from his sins, went about to do as a certain shrewish wife once told her husband that she would do, when she came from shrift.  “Be merry, man,” quoth she now, “for this day, I thank God, I was well shriven.  And I purpose now therefore to leave off all mine old shrewishness and begin even afresh!”

Vincent:  Ah, well, uncle, can you report her so?  That word I heard her speak, but she said it in sport to make her goodman laugh.

Anthony:  Indeed, it seemed she spoke it half in sport.  For in that she said she would cast away all her old shrewishness, therein I daresay she sported.  But in that she said she would begin it all afresh, her husband found that in good earnest!