by Johann Hebel
When the third man saw that the Jew was well versed in the Bible he started on a different tack: ‘Who draws out his work as long as he can but still finishes it on time?’ The Jew said, ‘The ropemaker who is good at his job.’
The fourth one asked: ‘Who gets paid for pulling wool over people’s eyes?’ The Jew said, ‘A wigmaker.’
Meanwhile they were approaching a village and one of them said, ‘That’s Bamlach.’ Then the fifth asked: ‘In which month do the people of Bamlach eat least?’ The Jew said, ‘In February, it has only twenty-eight days.’
The sixth said: ‘There are two brothers born of the same mother, but only one of them is a distant relative of mine.’ The Jew said, ‘The distant relative lives some way away from you, the other brother lives nearby.’
A fish leapt out of the water, so the seventh asked: ‘Which fishes have their eyes closest together?’ The Jew said, ‘The smallest.’
The eighth asked: ‘How can you ride in the shade from Basel to Berne in the summer when the sun is shining ever so hot?’ The Jew said, ‘When there’s no shade you get off and walk.’
The ninth riddle was: ‘If someone is riding from Basel to Berne in winter and has forgotten his gloves, how can he see to it that he doesn’t get frozen hands?’ The Jew said, ‘He can clench both hands and change them into fists.’
The tenth asked: ‘Why does a cooper sneak unseen into his barrels?’ The Jew said, ‘Because barrels have no doors through which an honest man might enter.’
That left number eleven. He asked: ‘How can five people share five eggs so that each of them gets one and one is still left in the bowl?’ The Jew said, ‘The last man takes the bowl with the egg in it, then he can leave it in the bowl as long as he likes.’
Now it was his turn, and he meant to make a good picking. With much bowing and scraping and a wily winning smile he asked: ‘How can you cook two trout in three pans so that there is one trout in each pan?’ No one could answer that, and all of them in turn gave the Israelite a twelve-kreuzer piece.
Your Family Friend would like to put this same question to all his readers, from Milan up to Copenhagen, and so make a nice pile, more than he gets from the Almanac which pays him little. For when the eleven of them demanded that the Jew earn his money and solve this riddle too, he turned doubtfully this way and that, shrugging his shoulders and rolling his eyes. Eventually he said, ‘I’m only a poor Jew.’ The others said, ‘Spare us the build-up! Tell us the answer!’ ‘No offence meant,’ was the reply, ‘I am only a poor Jew, you know!’ Finally, after much persuasion and assurances that if only he would give the answer they wouldn’t take anything amiss, he put his hand in his pocket and took out one of the twelve-kreuzer pieces he had won, put it on the table in front of him and said, ‘I don’t know the answer either. So there’s my twelve kreuzers!’
When the others heard that they gaped and said he had cheated. But since they had to laugh nevertheless and were rich and good-hearted men, and their companion, the Hebrew, had whiled away the time for them from Kleinkems to Chalampé, they let the matter stand, and the Jew left the boat with… Now then, which of you can work it out in your head! How much did the Jew take away, in guilders and kreuzers? He had twelve kreuzers and a brass button to start with. He won eleven twelve-kreuzer pieces solving the riddles, eleven times twelve kreuzers with his own riddle, paid back one of the coins, and gave an eighteen-kreuzer tip to the boatman.
The Recruit
In 1795 a fine well-built lad joined the Swabian Regiment as a recruit. The officer asked him how old he was. The recruit replied, ‘Twenty-one. I was ill for a whole year, otherwise I’d be twenty-two.’
The Ropemaker’s Reply
A horsethief in Donauwörth was hanged when his time came, and Your Family Friend has often wondered, ‘Why does someone who’s heading for the gallows or the jail one of these days need to steal a horse? Wouldn’t he get there soon enough on foot?’ This fellow from Donauwörth was one of those who thought the gallows wouldn’t wait for him unless he was on horseback, and just as the horse fell into the hands of a stupid thief, the thief fell into the hands of a stupid hangman. You see, the hangman had put the necklace of hemp on him and pushed him off the rung of the ladder, but for some time he still rolled his eyes from one side to the other as if he were searching around in the crowd for another horse for himself. For many had come on horseback or on haycarts so as to have a better view. But when the crowd began to voice their disapproval and the incompetent hangman was at a loss what to do, eventually in his panic he threw himself at the dangling man, embraced him with both arms as if to bid him farewell and pulled with all his might so as to tighten the noose and strangle him. Now the rope broke and both of them fell to the ground together, and they might just as well never have climbed the scaffold. The criminal was still alive, and his lawyer later saved him. For he said, ‘The miscreant stole only one horse, not two, therefore he has earned only one hanging,’ and he added lots of letters and numbers in Latin as lawyers do. But the hangman loosed his anger on the ropemaker when he saw him that afternoon: ‘Do you call that a rope?’ he said. ‘Someone should have strung you up with it!’ The ropemaker had an answer to that: ‘Nobody told me,’ he said, ‘it had to carry two scoundrels. It was strong enough for one, you or the horsethief!’
The Cure
For all their piles of shekels rich people sometimes still have to put up with all sorts of troubles and illnesses of which a poor man, thank God, knows nothing. For there are illnesses that don’t lurk in the air but in full plates and glasses, in soft armchairs and silken beds. A certain rich citizen of Amsterdam could tell you a thing or two on that score! He would spend the whole morning sitting in his armchair, smoking if he wasn’t too sluggish, or gazing out of the window, but at midday he ate like a horse, and sometimes his neighbours said, ‘Is that the wind getting up outside or is it the neighbour snorting?’ He ate and drank all afternoon too, something cold perhaps, and then something hot, not because he was hungry or fancied a particular dish but just to pass away the time till evening, so that you couldn’t rightly say where his dinner finished and his supper began. After supper he went to bed as weary as if he’d been heaving stones or chopping logs all day long. Thus in time his body grew fat and as ungainly as a sack of corn. Neither eating nor sleeping gave him pleasure, and for some time, as quite often happens, he was neither very well nor very ill. But he would have told you he had 365 illnesses, a different one for each day of the year. Each and every doctor in Amsterdam was called upon to treat him. He swallowed whole fire-buckets full of mixtures, powders by the shovelful, and pills as big as ducks’ eggs, and people joked and called him the apothecary’s shelf on two legs. But all the treatments did him no good, for he didn’t do as the doctors told him but said, ‘Hang it all, what’s the point of being rich if I have to live a dog’s life and all the money in the world can’t get a doctor to cure me?’
Eventually he heard of a doctor who lived a hundred hours’ journey away: it was said he was so clever that his patients got well as soon as he looked at them and that Death slunk away as soon as he came on the scene. Our man pinned his hopes on this doctor and wrote to him of his complaints. This doctor quickly saw what he needed all right, not medicine, that is, but moderation and exercise, and said, ‘You wait, I’ll soon have you cured!’ So he wrote him a letter as follows: ‘My friend, you are in a bad way, but you can be helped if you do as I tell you. You have a nasty beast in your belly, a dragon with seven mouths. I must deal with this dragon myself, so you’ll have to come here to me. But first of all you must not come by coach or on horse but on Shanks’s pony, otherwise you will shake up the dragon and it
will rip out your guts, biting right through seven intestines all at once. Second, you must not eat more than a plate of vegetables twice a day, with a sausage at midday and an egg in the evening and a bowl of broth with chives on top in the morning. Anything more than that will only make the dragon grow so that it will c
rush your liver, and then it won’t be your tailor who takes your measurements, but the undertaker. That’s my advice and if you don’t heed it you won’t live to hear the cuckoo next spring! It’s up to you!’ The very next morning after reading that, the patient had his boots waxed and set off as the doctor had ordered. On that first day he walked so slowly that a snail could have run ahead to announce his progress, and he ignored those who greeted him on his way and stamped on every tiny creature that was crawling on the ground. But already on the second and third mornings the birds seemed to be singing more sweetly than for many a year, and he thought the dew so fresh and the poppies in the fields so bright, and everyone he met seemed so nice, and he
was too. And each morning when he left his lodging place the world was more beautiful and he strode on his way more easily and more cheerfully. On the eighteenth day he reached the doctor’s town, and when he got up the next morning he felt so well he said, ‘I couldn’t have got better at a worse time, just when I have to see the doctor! I just wish my ears were ringing a bit or I had a touch of dropsy!’ When he went in to see the doctor, the doctor took hold of his hand and said, ‘Now then, start from the beginning again and tell me what’s wrong with you.’ He replied, ‘Doctor, nothing is wrong with me, praise God, and I hope you are as well as I am.’ The doctor said, ‘I see a good spirit told you to take my advice. The dragon has gone. But its eggs are still inside you, and you must therefore go back home on foot, and when you get back you must saw lots of wood
when no one’s watching and eat only enough to satisfy your hunger so that the eggs don’t hatch, and then you may live to a good old age.’ And he smiled as he spoke. But the rich patient who had come so far said, ‘Sir, you are a weird one, yet I think I take your meaning,’ and after that he followed his advice and lived for eighty-seven years four months and ten days, a picture of health, and every New Year he sent the doctor twenty doubloons with his best wishes:
How Freddy Tinder and His Brother Played Another Trick on Carrot-Top Jack
When Harry and Freddy Tinder were out of jail again Harry said to his brother, ‘Freddy, let’s call in on Carrot-Top Jack, otherwise he’ll think we were put away between cold damp walls for ever!’ ‘We’ll play a trick on him,’ said Freddy to Harry, ‘and see if he knows it’s us!’ So it was that Jack got an anonymous note: ‘Carrot-Top Jack, watch out tonight! Two thieves have made a bet that one of them will steal the sheet from under your wife and you won’t be able to stop them.’ Jack said, ‘Here’s a pair of proper rascals! One bets he’ll take the sheet, and the other writes to stop him winning. If I didn’t know for sure that Harry and Freddy were in prison I’d think it was them!’
That night the two rogues crept up through the hemp field. Harry leant a ladder against the window so that Jack would hear him, and climbed up, holding in front of him a straw dummy that looked like a man. When Jack inside heard the ladder being put into place he slipped quietly out of bed and stood beside the window with a big stick. ‘This is the best kind of pistol,’ he said to his wife, ‘it’s always loaded.’ And when he saw the dummy’s head come wobbling up towards him he thought, ‘Here he comes,’ flung open the window and gave it an almighty crack over the head so that Harry dropped the dummy and gave a loud scream. Meanwhile Freddy was standing as quiet as a mouse by the front door. Carrot-Top Jack heard the scream and then suddenly it was all quiet, and he said, ‘Wife, I think something may be wrong, I’d better go down and see!’ As he went out of the front door Freddy slipped from behind it into the house and up to the bed, and once again as in the earlier story when they stole the pig (and it is just as true this time) he imitated Jack’s voice. ‘Wife,’ he said, sounding anxious, ‘that fellow is as dead as mutton, and just imagine, it’s the mayor’s son! Quick, give me the sheet and I’ll carry him away in it into the forest and bury him there, otherwise we’re for the high jump!’ She took fright, sat up and gave him the sheet. Hardly had he gone when the real Jack came back and said, very much relieved, ‘It was only a silly trick! The thief was a straw dummy.’ But when his wife asked, ‘What have you done with the sheet then?’ and he saw that she was lying on the bare straw mattress, Jack’s eyes were at last opened and he said, ‘Oh, you damned rascals! It must be Freddy and Harry after all, it can’t be anybody else!’
But on the way home Freddy said to Harry, ‘Let’s call it all off from now on, brother. Everything you get in jail is bad, unless you count good beatings, and from the narrow window there you can see that you-know-what by the road and it doesn’t look as though it’s any fun to dangle from it!’ So Freddy too became an honest man again. But Harry said, ‘I’m not packing it in just yet.’
The Clever Sultan
As he was about to go to church one Friday the Grand Sultan of the Turks was approached by one of his subjects, a poor man with a dirty beard, a tattered coat and holes in his slippers. He folded his arms in respectful greeting and said, ‘Almighty Sultan, do you believe what the Holy Prophet says?’ The Sultan, who was a kindly man, said, ‘Yes, I believe what the Prophet says!’ The poor man continued, ‘The Prophet says in the Koran, “All Muslims are brothers”. So, brother, please be so good and share your inheritance with me!’ The Sultan smiled and thought, ‘This is a new way of asking for alms!’ and gave him a silver thaler. The Turk looked long and hard at the coin, first one side then the other. Then he shook his head and said, ‘Brother, why do I get one shabby thaler when you have more gold and silver than can be loaded on a hundred mules, and my children at home are so hungry they gnaw at their nails and I shall soon have forgotten that jaws are meant for chewing with? Do you call that sharing with your brother?’ But the kindly Sultan wagged a warning finger and said, ‘Be satisfied, brother, and don’t tell anyone how much I gave you, for ours is a large family, and if all our other brothers come to ask me for their share of the inheritance there won’t be enough to go round and you will have to give something too!’ His brother took the point and went to Abu Tlengi the baker and bought a loaf of bread for his children while the Sultan went into church and said his prayers.
A Shave as an Act of Charity
A poor man with a black beard came into a barber’s shop and asked, for the love of God, not for a piece of bread, but a shave: would the barber kindly take off his beard so that he looked like a decent Christian again? The barber picked up his worst razor, thinking, ‘Why should I blunt a good one when he’s paying less than nothing?’ While he was scraping and hacking away at the poor wretch, who couldn’t complain since the bad job was being done for nothing, the dog started howling in the yard outside. ‘What’s up with Rover,’ said the barber, ‘to make him whine and howl like that?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Mike. ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Johnny. But the poor devil under the razor said, ‘He must be being shaved for the love of God too, like me.’
A Secret Beheading
Whether or not on that morning of 17 June that year the executioner at Landau said the Lord’s Prayer with proper devotion and its ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’ – that I don’t know. But a delivery came, a note posted from Nancy, and if he hadn’t said his prayers, then it arrived on just the right day. The note said: ‘Executioner at Landau, come to Nancy straight away and bring your big sword. You will be told what to do and paid well.’ A coach was waiting outside. ‘It’s my job’, thought the executioner and got into the coach. When he was still one hour this side of Nancy, it was evening already and the sun was setting among blood-red clouds, the driver drew up, saying, ‘It will be fine again tomorrow’, when suddenly three strong armed men were standing by the road, climbed in beside the executioner and promised that he wouldn’t come to any harm, ‘But you must let us blindfold you!’ And when they had put the blindfold over his eyes they said, ‘Driver, drive on!’ The coachman drove on, and it seemed to the executioner that he was taken a good twelve hours further, and he had no way of telling where he was. He heard the midnight owls; he heard the cocks crow; he heard t
he morning bells. Then without warning the coach stopped again. They took him into a house and gave him something to drink and a nice roll and sausage too. When he was strengthened by food and drink they led him on inside the same building, through several doors and up stairs and down, and then they removed his blindfold and he saw he was in a large room. It was hung all around with black drapes, and wax candles burnt on the tables. In the middle sat a woman on a chair with her neck bared and a mask over her face, and she must have been gagged, for she couldn’t speak, only sob. Round the walls stood a number
of gentlemen dressed in black and with black crape over their faces so that the executioner could not have recognized them if he had met them again an hour later. And one of them handed him his sword and ordered him to cut off the head of the woman sitting on the chair. The poor executioner’s blood ran cold and he said they must excuse him: his sword was dedicated to the service of justice and he could not defile it with murder. But one of the gentlemen by the wall pointed a pistol at him and said, ‘Get on with it! Do as we tell you or you’ll never set eyes on the church tower at Landau again!’ The executioner thought of his wife and children at home. ‘If I’ve no choice,’ he said, ‘and I must shed innocent blood, then on your head be it!’ and with one blow he severed the poor woman’s head from her body.
When it was done one of the men gave him a purse with two hundred doubloons. They put the blindfold over his eyes again and took him back to the coach he had come in. The men who had brought him there escorted him again. And when at last the coach drew up and they let him get out and remove the blindfold he was left standing where the three men had joined the coach, one hour this side of Nancy on the Landau road, and it was night. The coach sped off back.