One day Mulla Nasruddin was presiding over a case as a Judge. An inn owner went first and exclaimed, “This man refuses to pay the bill!” “I would have,” the man shouted, “but he charged me two hundred dollars for three hard-boiled eggs!” “Is this true?” Mulla asked the inn owner. “Well,” he replied, “as I explained to him earlier, those eggs could have been hatched into chickens, which in turn would have produced more eggs, which in turn would have hatched into more chickens, and so on, and so forth. The way I see it, his three eggs would have yielded me hundreds of dollars’ worth of chickens and eggs.” “All right,” Mulla said, “Wait here while I go and plant some boiled peas in my garden.” “But Sir,” the inn owner said, “boiled peas will not grow into anything.” “In that case,” Mulla replied, “this case is dismissed!” The inn owner got the taste of his own medicine.
The Bill
