Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 2.djvu/557

Rh  to his mother, and having leave, he approached to her, and making as tho' he would speak to her in her ear, with his teeth he bit off her nose: for which, when the judge blamed him, he answered him in this manner, My Lord, she is the cause of my death, for if she had well chastised me, I had not come to this shame."

This fable, it is true, has a different application, and the plot of it, (so to speak) likewise varies; but the singular thought of biting off a person's nose, can have had but one origin.

The examination of the false witnesses in this story, will remind the reader of the mode by which the wickedness of the elders was discovered in the Apocrypha.