Page:Turkish fairy tales and folk tales (1901).djvu/65

 only answered: "Angry? Not I! Why should I be?" At the same time he entrusted nothing more to him, but let him sit in the house without anything to do.

His master had a wife and child, and Mehmed had to look after them. He liked to dandle the child up and down, but he knocked it about and hurt it, so clumsy was he; so he soon had to leave that off. But the wife began to be afraid that her turn would come next, sooner or later, so she persuaded her husband to run away from the fool one night. Mehmed overheard what they said, hid himself in their store-*box, and when they opened it in the next village out he popped.

After a while his master and his wife agreed together that they would go and sleep at night on the shores of a lake. They took Mehmed with them, and put his bed right on the water's edge, that he might tumble in when he went to sleep. However, the fool was not such a fool but that he made his master's wife jump into the lake instead of himself. "Art angry, master?" cried he.—"Angry indeed! How can I help being angry when I see my property wasted, and my wife and child killed, and myself a beggar—and all through thee!" Then the fool seized his master, put him in mind of their compact, and pitched him into the water.