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When we were arrived there he confided the charge of the garden to a partner of his, and, fearing possible danger from the affair in the road, he hid himself and me in the house of one of his friends in the town. The next day they laid their plans and acted as follows: my master they concealed in a chest; me they hung by the feet, and carried me up a ladder to the second story, and shut me up there. The soldier, as we heard afterwards, picked himself up out of the road with difficulty when we were gone, and made his way into the city, stunned with the beating he had had. When he found the soldiers of his company, he told them of the gardener's madness, and they, accompanying him, learned our hiding-place. They brought the magistrates of the city with them, who sent some of their people into the house and bade all within come out. When they appeared, the gardener was nowhere to be seen. The soldiers, however, declared he was in the house with me, his ass, but the people of the house said no other creature was left inside, either man or ass. At this an uproar of vociferation rose in the narrow street, and I, in my headstrong curiosity about everything, longed to know who were shouting, so I peeped down from above through the window. As soon as they saw me they raised an outcry. The people of the house were detected in their lie, and the magistrates, entering and ransacking everything, found my master lying in the chest. Him they arrested and packed off to prison, to give an account of his desperate conduct, and me they brought down and handed over to the soldiers. They all burst into inextinguishable laughter at my having given. information from the upper story and betrayed my own master, and I was the origin, on this occasion, of the proverb about the "peeping ass."
