At length a bald-headed mendicant came to the shop one
day, upon seeing whom, the parrot, breaking her long silence, cried out:
"Poor fellow! poor fellow! hast thou, too, upset some oil-jar?"[39]
[39] This tale is found in the early Italian novelists,
slightly varied, and it was doubtless introduced by
Venetian merchants from the Levant: A parrot belonging
to Count Fiesco was discovered one day stealing some
roast meat from the kitchen. The enraged cook,
overtaking him, threw a kettle of boiling water at him,
which completely scalded all the feathers from his head,
and left the poor bird with a bare poll. Some time
afterwards, as Count Fiesco was engaged in conversation
with an abbot, the parrot, observing the shaven crown of
his reverence, hopped up to him and said: "What! do
_you_ like roast meat too?"
In another form the story is orally current in the North
of England. Dr. Fryer tells it to this effect, in his
charming _English Fairy Tales from the North Country_: A
grocer kept a parrot that used to cry out to the
customers that the sugar was sanded and the butter mixed
with lard. For this the bird had her neck wrung and was
thrown upon an ash-heap; but reviving and seeing a dead
cat beside her she cried: "Poor Puss! have you, too,
suffered for telling the truth?"
There is yet another variant of this droll tale, which
has been popular for generations throughout England, and
was quite recently reproduced in an American journal as
a genuine "nigger" story: In olden times there was a
roguish baker who made many of his loaves less than the
regulation weight, and one day, on observing the
government inspector coming along the street, he
concealed the light loaves in a closet.
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