apparently transformed into a Turkish trooper, recalls the nursery rhyme of the little woman “who went to market her eggs for to sell,” and falling asleep on the king’s highway a pedlar cut off her petticoats up to the knees, and when she awoke and saw her condition she exclaimed, “Lawk-a-mercy me, this is none of I!” and so on.  And not less diverting is the pelting the blockhead receives from his brother fullers—­altogether, a capital story.

        Taleof the simpleton husband.—­Vol.  XI. p. 162.

The “curious” reader will find European and Asiatic versions of this amusing story in “Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.”  Published for the Chaucer Society, pp. 177-188 and (in a paper contrived by me:  “The Enchanted Tree”) p. 341-364.

    Tale of the three men and our lord Isa.—­Vol xi. p. 170.

Under the title of “The Robbers and the Treasure-Trove” I have brought together many European and Asiatic versions of this wide-spread tale in “Chaucer Analogues,” pp. 415-436.

     The Melancholist and the Sharper. —­ Vol.  XI. p. 180.

A similar but much shorter story is found in Gladwin’s “Persian Moonshee,” and storybooks in several of the Indian vernaculars which have been rendered into English: 

A miser said to a friend, “I have now a thousand rupees, which I will bury out of the city, and I will not tell the secret to any one besides yourself.”  They went out of the city together, and buried the money under a tree.  Some days after the miser went alone to the tree and found no signs of his money.  He said to himself, “Excepting that friend, no other has taken it away, but if I question him he will never confess.”  He therefore went to his (the friend’s) house and said, “A great deal of money is come into my hands, which I want to put in the same place; if you will come to-morrow, we will go together.”  The friend, by coveting this large sum, replaced the former money, and the miser next day went there alone and found it.  He was delighted with his own contrivance, and never again placed any confidence in friends.

One should suppose a miser the last person to confide the secret of his wealth to any one; but the Italian versions bear a closer resemblance to the Arabian story.  From No. 74 of the “Cento Novelle Antiche” Sacchetti, who was born in 1335 and is ranked by Crescimbini as next to Boccaccio, adapted his 198th novella, which is a most pleasing version of the Asiatic story: 

Italianversion.