A simpleton, wishing to teach his horse to be a small eater, gave him no food at all. At length the horse having starved to death, he exclaimed: “I have suffered a great loss, for now that he had just learned not to eat he has died.” A simpleton, looking out of the window of a house which he had bought, asked the passers-by whether the house was becoming to him. A simpleton, having dreamed that he had trodden on a nail and that the wound pained him, on waking bound up his foot. Another simpleton, having learned the cause, remarked: “It served you right, for why do you sleep without sandals?” A simpleton, meeting a doctor, hid himself behind a wall. Some one asking the cause, he answered: “I have not been sick for a long time, and therefore I am ashamed to come into the sight of a physician.” A simpleton had sealed up a vessel of Aminæan wine which he had. His servant, having made a hole in the vessel beneath and drawn off some of the wine, he was astonished to see the contents diminished while the seals remained unbroken. A neighbor having told him to look whether it had not been taken out from below, he replied: “Why, you fool, it’s the upper part, not the lower, that is missing.” A simpleton, meeting another simpleton, said, “I heard you were dead.”—“And yet,” replied the other, “you see that I am still alive.”—“Well,” said the first in perplexity, “I don’t know what to believe, for he who told me is much more deserving of confidence than you.” A simpleton, learning that the raven would live more than two hundred years, bought one and brought it up, that he might test the matter. Of twin brothers, one died. A simpleton, thereupon, meeting the survivor, asked, “Is it you that died, or your brother?” A simpleton, in danger of being shipwrecked, called for his tablets that he might make his will. Seeing, thereupon, his slaves lamenting their lot, he said, “Do not grieve, for I am going to set you free.” A simpleton, wishing to cross a river, went on board the boat on horseback. When some one asked the reason, he answered that he wanted to get over in a hurry. A simpleton and a bald man and a barber, travelling together, agreed to keep watch in turn four hours each while the others slept. The barber’s turn came first. He quietly shaved the head of the sleeping simpleton, and when the time elapsed awoke him. The latter, scratching his head as he got up, and finding it bare, cried out: “What a rascal that barber is; he’s waked the bald man instead of me!” BYZANTINE LITERATURE. The list of sophists, grammarians, historians, and other writers belonging to the Byzantine period, contains names without number and without lustre. A love-song of the Justinian era (527-565 A.D.), by the emperor’s privy-councillor, will give an idea of the poetry of this age. THE DRENCHED LOVER.