Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/460

In the Bürgerlust, part 1. Str. 48, there are still more examples. Three lazy apprentices laid a wager with each other as to which of them was the laziest. The first said, "If my dinner were set on the table, I would not care to eat." The next said, "And if any one put it into my mouth and chewed it for me, I should not care to swallow it." The third was so idle he would hardly open his lips, but said, "How can you care to speak!" and this one, as was just, won the wager. The same story is told by Abraham a St. Clara (Auserlesene Gedanken, Vienna, 1812, part 1. 150), only the second says, "Even if the food were put into my mouth by force, I would still not swallow it." We have also heard it narrated as follows: "Three idle girls were sitting under a nut-tree, and the first said, "Even if all the nuts that are ripe would fall down, I would not shake a twig." The second said, "Even if they were lying there, I should like to know who would pick them up?" The third said, "Ah, who cares to talk about it?" Abraham a St. Clara has however written the story again, and quite differently, and much more like ours (1. 40, 41). A sluggard had three sons, and in his last will declared, that the one who was the laziest should be his principal heir. After the early death of the father, they were summoned before the court and examined as to their idleness. The first confessed that, even if his foot were on red-hot coals, he would not so much as draw it back; the second declared that he would remain standing on the ladder which led to the gallows, and would not even cut the rope which was round his neck, simply because he was too idle to get a knife out of his pocket. The third said that he was too lazy to shut his eyes, much less to cover them with his hand, if it were raining needles, and he were lying on his back. In Keller's Fastnachtspiele, p. 86, the one is to be the heir who tells the most lies, and is the idlest. When he is lying under a spout, he lets the drops run in at one ear and out by the other. There is a passage in Fischart's Flohhatz, 48², where it is said of a sluggard, "She does not move a hair's breadth, like the man who let the water drop in his ear." Straparola has also a good story of three sluggards, which however is only to be found in a complete edition; it is communicated by Rumohr in the Sammlung für Kunst und Geschichte, 2. 171, and following. See No. 83, in Colshorn. An Indian story of four Brahmins who quarrel about which of them is the most foolish, is allied to this. See Schlegel's Indische Bibliothek, 2. 265-268. A Turkish story, which Moritz Hartmann heard told in Constantinople (Kölnische Zeitung, 1854, No. 175), also belongs to this group. There was a certain man to whom work had become so distasteful that at last he could not bring himself to raise his arm. He lay in the street, let the sun shine on him, and hungered. As he was poor, and had no slave to put a morsel of food in his