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A story akin to that of the Gothamite fishers, if not, indeed, an older form of it, is told in Iceland of the Three Brothers of Bakki, who came upon one of the hot springs which abound in that volcanic island, and taking off their boots and stockings, put their feet into the water and began to bathe them.
And the third person is he who would enter the kingdom of heaven with all his world of vanities, but is cast down into hell." And now a few more Indian and other stories of the Gothamite class to conclude the present section. In Málava there were two Bráhman brothers, and the wealth inherited from their father was left jointly between them.
Stand forth, vassal Number Two. This, General, is Captain Schuyler, a mite of a man physically a Gothamite, in fact but a tower of wit and wisdom when permitted to speak." He hasn't an idea on the subject of supplies except that commissary cigars are bad, but his senator said he had to have something and that's what he got.
If some of the last-cited stories are not precisely Gothamite drolleries, though all are droll enough in their way, there can be no doubt whatever that we have a Sinhalese brother to the men of Gotham in the following: A villager in Ceylon, whose calf had got its head into a pot and could not get it out again, sent for a friend, celebrated for his wisdom, to release the poor animal.
'I have great temptations, on this occasion, says the prim Gothamite, 'to express my own resentments upon your present state. 'My own resentments! And why did he not fall into this temptation? Why, truly, because he knew not what that state was which gave him so tempting a subject only by a conjecture, and so forth. He then dances in his style, as he does in his gait!
This fable is also found in Babrius. ; in the Kathá Sarit Ságara; in the several versions of the Fables of Bidpaï; and in the Avadánas, translated into French from the Chinese by Stanislas Julien. To return to Gothamite stories.
To the highly educated and imaginative portion of our good Gothamite population, the Doctor's glowing periods, full of the grandest speculations as to the starry worlds around us, their wondrous magnificence and ever-varying aspects of beauty and happiness were inexpressibly fascinating.
Unlike other old collections of facetiæ, the little work is remarkably free from objectionable stories; some are certainly not very brilliant, having, indeed, nothing in them particularly "Gothamite," and one or two seem to have been adapted from the Italian novelists.
Gothamite stories appear to have been familiar throughout Europe during the later Middle Ages, if we may judge from a chapter of the Gesta Romanorum in which the monkish compiler has curiously "moralised" the actions of three noodles: We read in the "Lives of the Fathers" that an angel showed to a certain holy man three men labouring under a triple fatuity.
But our friend the Gothamite reappears in the pedant who saw some sparrows on a tree, and went quietly under it, stretched out his robe, and shook the tree, expecting to catch the sparrows as they fell, like ripe fruit again, in the pedant who lay down to sleep, and, finding he had no pillow, bade his servant place a jar under his head, after stuffing it full of feathers to render it soft; again, in the cross-grained fellow who had some honey for sale, and a man coming up to him and inquiring the price, he upset the jar, and then replied, "You may shed my heart's blood like that before I tell such as you;" and again, in the man of Abdera who tried to hang himself, when the rope broke, and he hurt his head; but after having the wound dressed by the doctor, he went and accomplished his purpose.
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