But he stood the worthy officer a bottle of Tokay to toast the health of all honest men.

Remember: You must not steal silver spoons!

Remember: Someone will always stand up for what is right.

The Cheap Meal

There is an old saying: The biter is sometimes bit. But the landlord at the Lion in a certain little town was bitten first. He received a well-dressed customer who curtly demanded a good bowl of broth, the best his money would buy. Then he ordered beef and vegetables too for his money. The landlord asked him, all politeness, if he wouldn’t like a glass of wine with it. ‘Indeed I would,’ his guest replied, ‘if I can have a good one for my money.’ When he had finished, and he enjoyed it all, he took a worn six-kreuzer piece from his pocket and said, ‘Here you are, landlord, there’s my money!’ The landlord said, ‘What’s this? You owe me a thaler!’ The customer answered, ‘I didn’t ask for a meal for a thaler, but for my money. Here it is. It’s all I have. If you gave me too much for it then that’s your fault!’ It wasn’t really such a clever trick. It called only for cheek and a devil-may-care view of the consequences. But the best is yet to come.

‘You’re an utter villain,’ said the landlord, ‘and don’t deserve this. But you can have the meal for nothing and take this twenty-four kreuzer bit as well. Just keep quiet about it and go over to my neighbour who keeps the Bear and try the same trick on him!’ He said this because he had had a quarrel with his neighbour and resented his success and each was keen to do the other down.

But the artful customer smiled as he took the money he was offered in his one hand and reached carefully for the door with the other, wished the innkeeper good afternoon, and said, ‘I went to the Bear first, it was the landlord there who sent me over here!’

So really both of the innkeepers had been tricked; the cunning customer took advantage of their quarrel. Yet he might have also earned a further reward, grateful thanks from both of them, if they had learnt the right lesson from it and had made things up between them. For peace pays, whereas quarrels have to be paid for.

Dinner Outside

We often complain how difficult or impossible it is to get on with certain people. That may of course be true. But many such people are not bad but only strange, and if you got to know them well with all their ins and outs and learnt to deal with them properly, neither too wilfully nor too indulgently, then many of them might easily be brought to their senses. After all, one servant did manage to do that with his master. Sometimes he could do nothing right by him and, as often happens in such situations, was blamed for many things that were not his fault.

Thus one day his master came home in a very bad mood and sat down to dinner. The soup was too hot or too cold for him, or neither; no matter, he was in a bad mood! So he picked up the dish and threw it and its contents out of the open window into the yard below. So what do you think the servant did? He didn’t hesitate, he threw the meat he was bringing to table down into the yard after the soup, then the bread, the wine, and finally the tablecloth and everything on it, all down into the yard too. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’ said his master angrily and rose threateningly to his feet. But the servant replied quietly and calmly, ‘Pardon me if I misunderstood your wishes. I thought you wanted to eat outside today. The air’s warm, the sky’s blue, and look how lovely the apple blossom is and how happy the bees are sipping at the flowers!’ Never again would the soup go out through the window! His master saw he was wrong, cheered up at the sight of the beautiful spring day, smiled to himself at his man’s quick thinking, and in his heart he was grateful to him for teaching him a lesson.

The Clever Judge

Not everything that happens in the East is so wrong. We are told the following event took place there. A rich man had been careless and lost a large sum of money sewn up in a cloth. He made his loss known, and in the usual way offered a reward for its return, in this case a hundred thalers. Soon a good honest man came to see him. ‘I have found your money,’ he said.