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_Nardiello is sent three times by his father to trade, with a hundred ducats each time, and on each occasion buys an animal: first a cockroach, then a mouse, then a cricket. Driven out by his father for this, he reaches a place where, after curing a king’s daughter with the help of these animals and undergoing various adventures, he becomes her husband._ _The Prince and the Slave Woman warmly praised Sapia Liccarda’s good judgment; but still more warmly they praised Tolla, who had told the story so well that everyone seemed to have witnessed it. And since Popa came next in the order of the list, she rose grandly to the occasion and began as follows._ Fortune is a touchy woman, and shuns the faces of the wise, because they set more store by the turning of pages than the turning of a wheel. So she gladly keeps company with the ignorant and the worthless, and, content with the homage of the common people, thinks nothing of sharing her blessings among blockheads, as you shall hear in the tale that follows.

Once upon a time, in Vommaro, there lived a very, very rich farmer named Miccone, who had a son called Nardiello. This boy was the most wretched good-for-nothing ever to win first prize among dunces, so that his poor father was bitterly distressed and knew neither how nor by what means to set him straight and make him do anything properly. If he went to the tavern to guzzle with his idle companions, they made a fool of him; if he kept company with loose women, he bought the worst meat and paid above the market rate; if he gambled in the gaming dens, they fleeced him, ganged up on him, and took his money as easily as fried morsels from a plate. One way and another, he had squandered half his father’s property. So Miccone was forever raising the alarm, shouting, threatening, and saying, “What do you think you’re doing, you wastrel? Don’t you see my fortune is going down the drain? Give up, give up those accursed taverns, whose names begin with enemies and end with evils! Give them up: they are a migraine to the brain, a dropsy to the throat, and a flux to the purse! Give up, give up that godforsaken gambling, which risks your life and gnaws away your livelihood, drives out contentment and fritters away your cash, where the dice reduce you to nothing and the stakes whittle you down to a peg! Give up, give up whoring after those vile creatures, daughters of filthy sin, where you spill and spend, squander your substance on a strumpet, pine away over rotten flesh until there is not a bone left that does not stick out! Those are not harlots but a pirate sea, where you are captured by the Turks! Keep away from temptation, and you will shake off vice: remove the cause, as the fellow said, and you remove the effect. Here, then, are a hundred ducats. Go to the fair at Salierno and buy as many bull calves as you can, and in three or four years we shall have so many oxen. Once we have the oxen, we shall take to ploughing; once we have tilled the fields, we shall take to trading in grain; and if a good famine happens along, we shall measure our crowns by the bushel.

“And if nothing else comes of it, I shall buy you a title on some friend’s estate, and you too will be a titled gentleman, like so many others. So mind what you’re about, my son: every beginning grows, and he who never starts can never carry on.” “Leave it to this fine fellow,” Nardiello answered. “I’ll soon show you a little reckoning worked out by every rule.” “That’s what I like to hear,” his father replied;

and, having handed over the money, he sent him off toward the fair. But Nardiello had scarcely reached the waters of the Sarno, that lovely river which gave its name to the ancient Sarnelli family, when, in a pleasant grove of elms, he saw a fairy at the foot of a rock which, to soothe a perpetual trickle of cool water, had wrapped itself in ivy leaves. She was playing with a cockroach, which strummed a little guitar so splendidly that any Spaniard who heard it would have called the performance superb and magnificent. At the sight, Nardiello stopped and listened as though enchanted, saying that he would pay an eye out of his head to own so gifted an animal. The fairy told him that if he paid her a hundred ducats, she would give it to him. “You could not have caught me at a better moment,” Nardiello answered, “for I have them ready and waiting.” With that he dropped the hundred ducats into her lap, put the cockroach into a little sweetmeat box, and ran back to his father, with joy bubbling up from the very marrow of his bones. “Now you shall see, my dear sir,” he said, “whether I am a clever fellow and know how to look after my affairs! Without wearing myself out going all the way to the fair, I have found my fortune halfway there, and for a hundred ducats I have bought this jewel.” Hearing this and seeing the little box, his father felt certain he had bought some diamond trinket; but when he opened the box and saw the cockroach, shame at having been made a fool of and grief over the loss of his money were two bellows that puffed him up like a toad. Nardiello tried to explain the cockroach’s talents, but could not get a word out, for his father kept saying, “Be quiet! Shut up! Close that mouth! Stop it up! Not another squeak, you breed of mule, you horse-witted, donkey-headed fool! This instant, take that cockroach back to whoever sold it to you! Here are another hundred ducats: buy bull calves with the lot and come straight home. And mind you don’t let some devilish notion blind you again, or I’ll make you gnaw your hands off!” Nardiello took the money and set out toward Torre de Sarno. On reaching the same spot, he found another fairy amusing herself with a mouse, which performed the finest dance steps anyone had ever seen. Nardiello stood openmouthed for a while, watching the animal’s dainty steps, bows, capers, turns, and dashes, until he was quite beside himself; then he asked the fairy whether she would sell it, offering her a hundred ducats. The fairy accepted the bargain, took the money, and gave him the mouse in a box. Returning home, he showed poor Miccone his fine purchase. His father went into a dreadful rage, plunging and kicking like a skittish horse; and had a friend not happened to be there during the uproar, he would have given the boy’s back a thorough measuring.

At last his father, who was, after all, a kindly man, took another hundred ducats and said, “Mind you play no more of your tricks, for you will not get away with a third one. Go to Salierno, then, and buy the calves; for by the souls of my dead, if you go wrong this time, woe to the mother who bore you!”

With his head hanging, Nardiello set off for Salierno. When he reached the very same place, he found another fairy taking her pleasure in a cricket, which sang so sweetly that it sent people to sleep. Hearing this new sort of nightingale, Nardiello at once felt a longing to make the purchase. They agreed on a hundred ducats; he put it into a little cage made of a long gourd and twigs, and went home to his father. At this third piece of mischief, his father lost all patience and, snatching up a stick, gave him such a thrashing that he outdid Rodomonte. As soon as Nardiello could escape his clutches, he gathered up all three animals, left that country, and made his way toward Lombardy. There lived a great lord named Cenzone, who had an only daughter called Milla. Owing to some illness, she had fallen into such deep melancholy that for seven years together she had never been seen to laugh. Her father, in despair after trying a thousand remedies and spending everything he could lay hands on, had a proclamation issued that whoever made her laugh should have her for his wife. When Nardiello heard this proclamation, he took it into his head to try his luck, and, going before Cenzone, offered to make Milla laugh. The lord answered, “Keep your wits about you, my lad, for if you fail, you will lose the shape that fills your hood.” “Let the shape go, and the shoes with it!” Nardiello replied. “I mean to try, and let come what may.” The king sent for his daughter and seated himself beneath the canopy; Nardiello took the three animals out of their box, and they played, danced, and sang with such grace and such comical flourishes that the princess burst out laughing. But the prince wept in his heart, for the terms of his proclamation obliged him to give a jewel among women to the dregs of mankind. Unable to go back on his promise, however, he said to Nardiello, “I give you my daughter, with my kingdom as her dowry, but on condition that if you do not consummate the marriage within three days, I shall have you fed to the lions.” “A great fear that gives me!” said Nardiello. “In that time I’m man enough to consume the marriage, your daughter, and your whole household.” “Steady as we go, as the little pot said,” replied the king, “for melons are known by the tasting.” So the wedding was celebrated, and when evening came, when the sun, like a thief, is led with a cloak over its face to the prisons of the west, the newlyweds went to bed. But since the king had maliciously had a sleeping draught given to Nardiello, he did nothing all night but snore. When the same thing happened on the second and third nights, the king had him thrown into the lions’ enclosure. Finding himself there, Nardiello opened the animals’ box and said, “Since my fate has carted me on a bitter sledge to this dreadful pass, and I have nothing else to leave you, my lovely little creatures, I set you free, so that you may go wherever you please.” Once released, the animals began performing so many tricks and antics that the lions stood stock-still, like statues;

meanwhile the mouse spoke to Nardiello, whose soul was already between his teeth, saying, “Cheer up, master! Although you have given us our freedom, we wish to serve you more faithfully than ever, for you have fed us with such love and cared for us with such affection;

“and now, at the last, you have shown us such tenderness by setting us free. But have no fear: he who does good may hope for good; do a kindness, and forget it. Know, then, that we are enchanted creatures, and to show you what we can do and what we are worth, follow us, and we shall bring you out of this danger.” With Nardiello following behind, the mouse quickly made a hole large enough for a man to pass through, and by a stairlike ascent they brought him safely out above. They lodged him in a straw hut and told him to ask there for whatever he desired, since they would leave nothing undone to please him. “What would please me,” Nardiello answered, “would be for you, if the king has given Milla another husband, to do me the kindness of preventing that marriage from being consummated, for that would consume this wretched life of mine.” “That is nothing, nothing at all,” answered the animals. “Take heart and wait for us in this hut: we shall soon get to the bottom of the business.” They set off for court and found that the king had married his daughter to a great English lord, and that very evening the cask was to be broached. So the animals slipped deftly into the bridal chamber and waited until evening, when the banquet was over and the moon comes out to feed her little hens on dew. The couple went to bed; and since the bridegroom had overloaded his crossbow and taken aboard more than his share, he had scarcely burrowed beneath the sheets before he fell asleep like a slaughtered ox. Hearing him snore, the cockroach crept slowly up the bedpost, hauled himself beneath the covers, and slipped briskly into the bridegroom’s backside, serving him as such an effective suppository that he loosened his bowels enough to let him say, with Petrarch:

_From love he drew a subtle liquid forth._ The bride, hearing the squelching of his dysentery, _The breeze, the fragrance, coolness, and the shade_, woke her husband. When he saw with what perfume he had censed his idol, he nearly died of shame and burst with anger;

and, getting out of bed and washing himself from head to foot, he sent for the physicians, who blamed the mishap on his excesses at the banquet. When the following evening came, he consulted his servants, and they all agreed that he should swaddle himself in good stout cloths to guard against any further accident. This done, he went to bed; but when he fell asleep again and the cockroach returned to play him a second trick, it found every passage blocked. It went back to its companions in dismay, explaining how the bridegroom had built himself ramparts of swaddling bands, embankments of napkins, and trenches of rags. Hearing this, the mouse said, “Come with me, and you shall see whether I am a good enough sapper to clear the way for you.” Arriving at the scene, it began to gnaw the cloths and made a hole level with the other one. Through this the cockroach entered and administered another medicinal treatment, producing a sea of liquid topaz, whose Arabian fumes infected the palace. The stifled bride awoke to find a yellow flood had turned the Holland linen sheets into gold-patterned Venetian tabby. Holding her nose, she fled to the maidens’ chamber. The poor bridegroom summoned his servants and lamented at length the misfortune that had made him begin establishing the greatness of his house on such a slippery foundation. His attendants comforted him and advised him to keep his wits about him on the third night, telling him the story of the farting patient and the sharp-tongued physician. When the patient let a fart escape, the doctor, speaking in Latin fashion, said, _Sanitatibus_; when he followed it with another, he replied, _Ventositatibus_; but when a third came along, he opened his mouth wide and said, _Asinitatibus_. “So, although the first mosaic you laid in the marriage bed was blamed on overeating, and the second on a disordered stomach that had loosened your bowels, the third will be put down to a shitting disposition, and you will be driven out in stench and disgrace.” “Have no fear,” said the bridegroom. “Tonight, even if I burst, I mean to stay on the alert and not let sleep get the better of me. Besides, we shall think of some way to plug the main drain, so that no one can say of me, _Three times he fell, and at the third lay still._” With this resolution, when the next night came, he changed both room and bed and summoned his attendants, asking their advice on stopping up his body so that it would not play him a third trick. As for staying awake, all the poppies in the world would not put him to sleep. Among these servants was a young man who took an interest in the gunner’s art; and since everyone talks of his own trade, he advised the bridegroom to have a wooden plug made for himself, such as they used for mortars. This was immediately fashioned, and, having fitted it properly into place, he went to bed without touching the bride, for fear of exerting himself and spoiling the contrivance, and without closing his eyes, so as to be ready for any stirring of his stomach. The cockroach, seeing that the bridegroom would not fall asleep, said to its companions, “Alas, this time we are beaten, and our skill is of no use to us, for the bridegroom stays awake and gives me no chance to carry on the enterprise.” “Wait,” said the cricket, “and I shall help you.” It began singing sweetly, and sent the bridegroom to sleep. At this the cockroach hurried off to turn itself into a syringe; but finding the door shut and the road blocked, it returned in despair and confusion to its companions and told them what had happened. The mouse, whose sole aim was to serve and satisfy Nardiello, went straight to the pantry and, sniffing from jar to jar, came upon a pot of hot mustard. Dipping its tail into it, it ran to the bridegroom’s bed and smeared the insides of the poor Englishman’s nostrils. He began sneezing so violently that he shot out the plug with tremendous force; and since his back was turned toward the bride, it struck her in the chest with such fury that it almost killed her. The king came running at her screams and asked what was wrong. She said someone had fired a petard into her breast. The king marveled at this nonsense, wondering how she could speak with a petard in her chest; then he lifted the covers and sheets and found the bran mine and the mortar’s plug, which had raised a fine purple bruise on the bride. Though I cannot say which did her more harm, the stench of the powder or the blow from the ball. Seeing this filth, and hearing that it was the third liquidation of the contract he had drawn up, the king drove the man out of his kingdom. Then, reflecting that all this evil had befallen him because of his cruelty toward poor Nardiello, he beat his breast with his fists. While he was thus showing remorse for what he had done, the cricket said, “Do not despair, for Nardiello is alive, and his good qualities make him worthy to be Your Magnificence’s son-in-law. If you are willing for him to come, we shall send for him at once.” “Oh, welcome, welcome, my lovely little creature, with this news that deserves a handsome reward! You have lifted me out of a sea of troubles, for my heart was wrung by the wrong I had done that poor young man. So bring him here, for I wish to embrace him as a son and give him my daughter for his wife.” Hearing this, the cricket went hopping and leaping to the hut where Nardiello was staying, told him everything that had happened, and brought him to the royal palace. There the king welcomed and embraced him, Milla’s hand was placed in his, and, receiving the fairies’ enchantment, he became a handsome young man. He sent for his father from Vommaro, and they lived together happy and content, proving, after a thousand hardships and a thousand troubles, _More may come in a single hour than in a hundred years._