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what had befallen them in their search for the ass, each crying up the
other's perfection in braying. The whole story came to be known and
spread abroad through the villages of the neighbourhood; and the devil,
who never sleeps, with his love for sowing dissensions and scattering
discord everywhere, blowing mischief about and making quarrels out of
nothing, contrived to make the people of the other towns fall to braying
whenever they saw anyone from our village, as if to throw the braying of
our regidors in our teeth. Then the boys took to it, which was the same
thing for it as getting into the hands and mouths of all the devils of
hell; and braying spread from one town to another in such a way that the
men of the braying town are as easy to be known as blacks are to be known
from whites, and the unlucky joke has gone so far that several times the
scoffed have come out in arms and in a body to do battle with the
scoffers, and neither king nor rook, fear nor shame, can mend matters.
To-morrow or the day after, I believe, the men of my town, that is, of
the braying town, are going to take the field against another village two
leagues away from ours, one of those that persecute us most; and that we