The old horse looked at him, and he threw back his head, and laughed and laughed. “Bowling!” he said, “who ever heard of a horse bowling at cricket?”
87
The Pious Lion
Heard by Katharine M. Briggs in 1963 at Burford from Margaret Nash-Williams.
This also falls under Brunvand’s B400–B439, “Stories About Animals and Humans—Miscellaneous,” without a specific place. A reverse twist is here given to a comic tale in which a frightened man imitates the actions of a bear he encounters; when the bear defecates, the man says he is ahead of him (R. M. Dorson, “Dialect Stories of the Upper Peninsula,” Journal of American Folklore, LXI [1948], 127–28, No. 21, “The Bear on Sugar Island”).
THERE WAS A man walking in the jungle. I don’t know if he was a missionary or an explorer, but, at any rate, he had no gun with him. Suddenly he met a lion face to face. He knew that if he turned to run, the lion would be on him in a minute, and he had heard that if you stared hard at an animal it would grow uneasy and slink away. So he fixed the lion with his eye. He stared at the lion and the lion stared at him, and so they stood for about five minutes. Then the lion put its paws close together on the ground, and bent its head right down over them. This seemed a bit more hopeful, but the man was pretty nearly hypnotized by this time, and he thought the best thing he could do was to imitate the lion. So he bent his head down over his hands. So they stood for another five minutes.
Then the lion lifted its head and said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m saying grace.”
88
The Tortoises’ Picnic
Told to Katharine M. Briggs in August, 1963, in Kent by Celia Downes, about 26, who had previously told her the story when she was 14.
Under B500, The Turtle that was sent Back, Brunvand cites eleven texts. There is an Australian version in Partridge, The “Shaggy Dog” Story, pp. 82–83; and an English locale in Bennett Cerf, Laughing Stock (New York, 1945), p. 59.
THERE WERE ONCE three tortoises—a father, a mother, and a baby. And one fine spring day they decided that they would like to go for a picnic. They picked the place they would go to, a nice wood at some distance off, and they began to get their stuff together. They got tins of salmon and tins of tongue, and sandwiches, and orange squash, and everything they could think of. In about three months they were ready, and they set out, carrying their baskets.
They walked and walked and walked, and time went on, and after about eighteen months they sat down and had a rest. But they knew just where they wanted to go and they were about halfway to it, so they set out again. And in three years they reached the picnic place. They unpacked their baskets and spread out the cloth, and arranged the food on it and it looked lovely.
Then Mother Tortoise began to look into the picnic baskets. She turned them all upside down, and shook them, but they were all empty, and at last she said, “We’ve forgotten the tin-opener!” They looked at each other, and at last Father and Mother said, “Baby, you’ll have to go back for it.” “What!” said the baby, “me! Go back all that long way!” “Nothing for it,” said Father Tortoise, “we can’t start without a tin-opener. We’ll wait for you.” “Well, do you swear, do you promise faithfully,” said the baby, “that you won’t touch a thing till I come back?” “Yes, we promise faithfully,” they said, and Baby plodded away, and after a while he was lost to sight among the bushes.
And Father and Mother waited. They waited and waited and waited, and a whole year went by, and they began to get rather hungry. But they’d promised, so they waited. And another year went by, and another, and they got really hungry. “Don’t you think we could have just one sandwich each?” said Mother Tortoise. “He’d never know the difference.” “No,” said Father Tortoise, “we promised. We must wait till he comes back.”
So they waited, and another year passed, and another, and they got ravenous.
“It’s six years now,” said Mother Tortoise. “He ought to be back by now.”
“Yes, I suppose he ought,” said Father Tortoise. “Let’s just have one sandwich while we’re waiting.”
They picked up the sandwiches, but just as they were going to eat them, a little voice said, “Aha! I knew you’d cheat.” And Baby Tortoise popped his head out of a bush. “It’s a good thing I didn’t start for that tin-opener,” he said.
89
The Dog and the Hares
Printed by Edward M. Wilson in “Some Humorous English Folk Tales, Part I,” Folk-Lore, XLIX (1938), 191–92, No. 12, as told by James D. Harrison in Crosthwaite, September, 1936. He had heard it at the bar of the Royal Hotel, Bowness, Windermere, Westmorland.
Type 1889L, Lie: the Split Dog (MotifX1215.11) is a Münchausen tall tale, unreported however from European countries. Baughman cites only the present text from England, but has examples from a dozen American states. The earliest is from an 1808 jestbook.
Regional variants are given in R. M. Dorson, American Folklore (Chicago, 1959), pp. 41, 81, 108, 229, and an Illinois text is printed in Dorson, Buying the Wind, pp. 347–48, “Davy Crockett and Old Bounce.” Evidence that this and other tall tales circulate in Europe is given by Gustav Hennigsen in “Kunsten at Lyve Lodret,” Nordisk Institut for Folkedigtning, Studier No. 1 (Københaven, 1961), 1–39.
“Lay” is a scythe-blade. “Smoot” is a hole in the bottom of a wall for hares and rabbits to go through.
A MAN WAS bragging about his dog. His companion said he had a better dog than that, his was a whippet, and a grand dog for rabbitin’, a terrible dog for hares—and he would take this man with him to shew him what this dog would do. So they went up intull a field where they knew there was some hares, and they would try it. But he said, “We’ll take a lay along wi’ us.”
“What’ll we want wi’ a lay?”
“Oh!” he said, “we might need it.”
So he knocked the lay out o’ t’pole, and he would just want t’blade and didn’t want t’pole. So away they went up into this field. Ye know there’s a smoot hole through t’wa’ at t’bottom of t’field, and hares generally went through that smoot—he knew that. So he put t’lay in wi’ t’point facing t’same way that t’hare was coming, and so they went up t’breast and loosed t’dog. T’dog put a hare up directly and away they went down t’field towards t’smoot; another hare jump up and followed. But instead of t’hares goin’ through t’smoot, they jump the wall. But the dog took to t’smoot, and went through and split itself in two—it was going that fast—and one half went after one hare and one half went after the other.
90
The Man Who Bounced
Recorded from Ruth L. Tongue, September 28, 1963, as she heard the tale in Somerset.
The general category is Type 1920, Contest in Lying. Cf. “Boasting of One’s Own Region,” in R. M. Dorson, Folk Legends of Japan (Tokyo and Rutland, Vt. 1962), p. 207.
Baughman under MotifX1021.1(a), “Man falls with rubber boots on, bounces without stopping. He is shot to keep him from starving to death,” gives seven American references from the Midwest and the Far West. The super-cowboy Pecos Bill had to shoot his first wife Slue-Foot Sue when his horse threw her and she bounced for ten days on her steel bustle: Motif X1021 (aa).
The present variant is the first reported from England.
THERE WERE A stranger come to the village, and everything ’e saw, ’e knew something better. Trees in ’is country was ’igher, bridges was bigger, rivers was wider, and cliffs, well! They was real ’igh. And ’e were a-talking about someone as fell off a cliff, up ’is way, and ’ow ’e’d caught fire as ’e was falling down, it were such a long way down.
Well, one o’ they as was listening says, “Oh! ay. Now we got a cliff down country, and there were a little vat vellow, round as a apple ’e were, and ’e were walking on top o’ cliff, wind took and caught ’en, and blowed ’en over. Well! when ’e got to bottom, ’e bounced. ’E bounced up a ’undred feet, ’e come down and ’e bounced up fifty feet. And what’s more the poor little vellow, ’e went on a-bouncing and a-bouncing, for a week, and they ’ad to shoot ’un.”
91
Mark Twain in the Fens
Recorded from W. H. Barrett, October 12, 1963, as he heard the anecdote in the Cambridgeshire Fens.
