remaining so long silent, and seeing him smack his lips, took this for
an avowal that the porridge was good, and so they all jumped in after
him and were drowned.

Another traditional Gothamite story is related of a villager coming home
at a late hour and, seeing the reflection of the moon in a horse-pond,
believed it to be a green cheese, and roused all his neighbours to help
him to draw it out. They raked and raked away until a passing cloud sank
the cheese, when they returned to their homes grievously
disappointed.[10]--This is also related of the villagers near the
Marlborough Downs, in Wiltshire, and the _sobriquet_ of
"moon-rakers," applied to Wiltshire folk in general, is said to have had
its origin in the incident; but they assert that it was a keg of
smuggled brandy, which had been sunk in a pond, that the villagers were
attempting to fish up, when the exciseman coming suddenly upon the
scene, they made him believe they were raking the reflection of the
moon, thinking it a green cheese, an explanation which is on a par with
the apocryphal tale of the Gothamites and the messengers of King John.

The absurd notion of the moon being a fine cheese is of very respectable
antiquity, and occurs in the noodle-stories of many countries. It is
referred to by Rabelais, and was doubtless the subject of a popular
French tale in his time. In the twenty-second story of the _Disciplina
Clericalis_ of Peter Alfonsus, a Spanish Jew, who was baptised in
1106, a fox leaves a wolf in a well, looking after a supposed cheese,
made by the image of the moon in the water; and the same fable had been
told by the Talmudists in the fifth century.[11] The well-known "Joe
Miller" of the party of Irishmen who endeavoured to reach a "green
cheese" in the river by hanging one by another's legs finds its parallel
in a Mecklenburg story, in which some men by the same contrivance tried