There is, comparatively speaking, a handsome residuum after all deductions of genuine English _Ana_ in the two Tudor books, in which I elsewhere intimated a suspicion that Sir Thomas More and John Heywood had a hand; and there are also a few exceptions to the almost universal rule, that the old jest is by nature intractable--that is to say, archaic--not merely in language and orthography, but in temper, structure and blood. If one arranges in parallel columns the original text of the greater number, or rather the mass, of these relations, and a modern version, the alteration is merely external. The costume and tone in both are alike obsolete. Conspicuous and valuable illustrations of the contrary occur, however, in No. 7 and No. 48 of the _Hundred Merry Tales_, and No. 14 of the companion book. Nothing can be less dependent upon time than the account “Of the friar that told the three children’s fortunes”: if it is out of date, Boccaccio and Chaucer are; and in that other, “Of the chaplain, that said Our Lady’s matins a-bed,” there is a piquancy worthy of Sydney Smith. Items are frequently inserted in jest-books by the editors or collectors without the most distant suspicion of their veritable origin and character; and it also happens to this sort of literary composition, as it is known to do to engravings, that they exist in various stages of recension and in various degrees of divergence from their _prima stamina_. The process of affiliation, as I venture to call it, is necessarily cognate to that of corruption. The emigrant tale, whether from one part of the world, or from one book, to another, is bound to undergo a change of garb or one in the _dramatis personæ_. I shall proceed to exemplify this:-- “In a village of Picardy, after a long sickness, a farmer’s wife fell into a lethargy. Her husband was willing, good man, to believe her out of pain; and so, according to the custom of that country, she was wrapped in a sheet and carried out to be buried. But, as ill luck would have it, the bearers carried her so near a hedge, that the thorns pierced the sheet and waked the woman from her trance. Some years after, she died in reality; and as the funeral passed along, the husband would every now and then call out, ‘Not too near the hedge, not too near the hedge, neighbours.’” This is not the version of the incident usually current, for that substitutes a hearse for the bearers, a coffin for the sheet, and a tree against which the carriage was run, overturning the supposed corpse, and causing her to revive. But, first removing this latter superincumbent _stratum_, or ignoring it, let us examine the particulars, as I have just printed them. Have we not before us a mode of sepulture unknown to Western Europe in the conveyance of the woman to her grave simply enveloped in a cloth? That is, of course, Mohammedan, and is precisely the method pursued in India by the disciples of that creed at the present moment.