If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not wonder they should have had many followers. In the popular tales of the time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd situations, rarely in creditable ones. The priest seems to have been regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester. In one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it. The butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten. On this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper in his society. After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to each of them the skin of the sheep. In the morning, after he has gone, a prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock. From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar. "Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."