Swift's Hoax. 231 



in his hands, shouting, "Abrenuntio,'' and makes his escape. "Hold 

 on," says the bewildered cashier, " it is clear that I must have died." 

 While pondering- thus he reaches his own house and, finding 

 the door locked, knocks loudly. It is a cold, dark night; no one 

 is in the house with his wife except one servant, as artful as her 

 mistress, who, on hearing the knock, asks with a tearful voice, " "Who 

 knocks at such an hour at this sad abode?" Natural!}^ Lucas 

 cannot persuade them that he is the master of the house; there- 

 fore, after some parleying in the cold and rain, he breaks through 

 the door while the servant flees, and his wife, dressed in mour- 

 ning, faints at the sight of him. The cashier is now absolutely 

 convinced of his death. In the meanwhile the servant has informed 

 all accomplices in the jest of what passed in the house, and when 

 morning comes, the wife, dressed in gay attire, rouses her husband. 

 But he, noticing the absence of all signs of mourning, which had 

 been removed by his wife during his sleep, is more mystified than 

 ever. He imagines that he is in heaven and rehearses the whole 

 story of his experiences of the day before, while his wife summons 

 her friends to prove that her husband must have lost his mind. 

 All deny that the}' ever met him on the street, or fled from him 

 in terror, and poor Lucas finds his last state worse than the first. 

 Persuaded finally that he dreamed it all, the duped husband no 

 longer tries to explain the jest of which he has been the victim. 



This story of Tirso's has a purely literary character, easily dis- 

 tinguished from similar traditional stories which have been orally 

 transmitted ; it is, as will be remembered, one of three tales en- 

 closed in the framework of a fourth ; that is, three stories are told 

 within a fourth which explains them. In this form the tale exists in 

 numerous literatures, in versions marked by some diversities, and 

 it has already been treated by scholars of repute in the study of 

 fiction and folklore. ^ As a rule, however, every one has given 

 mere lists of similar tales without attempting to prove their relation 

 or establish a line of descent from an original version. The latter 

 is not likely to become possible. At best one may hope to dis- 

 tinguish between literary and folkloristic, or traditional versions, to 

 show how the first may be an embroidered form of the second, or 

 how, among certain stories which readih' group themselves together, 



1 Cf. Appendix I. 



