ABSTRACT
Once upon a time there was a monk who went around preaching fromvillage to village, and he was accompanied by a young brother fromthe same order, who was as clever as could be. This monk had come to preach during Lent in one of the communes of Sicily, and he was preaching his heart out in the attempt to win new converts. But the people of this area were not very pious, and they would never dream of sending the preacher all the little delicacies that people normally send during Lent. When the preacher realized that this was the case, he began filling his sermons with
pungent allusions to let the people know how far they were falling short. Finally, one of the bourgeois churchgoers took a large fish (it was a freshwater fish, because they didn’t have ocean fish in that area), put it in a pouch, and sent it to the preacher.
