Jewish merchant had tricked a certain bishop, who craved for all the
latest novelties, by stuffing a mouse with spices and offering it for
sale to him, saying that 'he had brought this most precious
never-before-seen animal from Judea,' and refusing to take less than a
whole measure of silver for it.[26] In exchange for their luxuries these
merchants took away with them Frisian cloth, which was greatly esteemed,
and corn and hunting dogs, and sometimes a piece of fine goldsmith's
work, made in a monastic workshop. And Bodo would hear a hundred
dialects and tongues, for men of Saxony and Frisia, Spain and Provence,
Rouen and Lombardy, and perhaps an Englishman or two, jostled each other
in the little streets; and from time to time there came also an Irish
scholar with a manuscript to sell, and the strange, sweet songs of
Ireland on his lips:

A hedge of trees surrounds me,
A blackbird's lay sings to me;
Above my lined booklet
The thrilling birds chant to me.

In a grey mantle from the top of bushes
The cuckoo sings:
Verily--may the Lord shield me!--
Well do I write under the greenwood.[27]

Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and men with performing
bears, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo's few pence out of his pocket. And
it would be a very tired and happy family that trundled home in the cart
to bed. For it is not, after all, so dull in the kitchen, and when we
have quite finished with the emperor, 'Charlemagne and all his peerage',
it is really worth while to spend a few moments with Bodo in his little