“Sir,” said Long-Bill, narrating this to King Silver Plume, “I tried to tell the parrot that I wasn’t the wicked fellow! But he was not ready to trust me.” The parrot said that people who are wicked often speak very sweetly and then he told a story about a foolish man who trusted his wife’s sweet words so much that he agreed to carry her and her lover too on his head. Long-Bill asked him what that story was. There was a town named Yauvanashri, said the parrot, where a carriage maker lived with his wife. He was called Mandamati, the duffer. His wife was a woman of bad character, but Mandamati was not ready to believe anything bad about her, because he had never himself seen her go with her lover. So, he believed that she was a very good woman.
False Sweetness
