On my way back from town, I met my neighbor Tom as he was tending his field of wheat.
"How as your journey?" he asked
with sweat running down his forehead. I myself was perspiring quite a bit as I
had traveled far on this unusually hot day.
"It was long and tiring," I
confessed, "and rather peculiar as well."
"Peculiar how?" Tom asked intrigued.
"As I was going to St. Ives I met a
man with seven wives," I explained.
 |
| Harbor in St. Ives, Cornwall (Geof Sheppard) |
"Seven wives? Why, that's an ungodly
amount. Not just in the holy sense, but what man would want to have seven wives
to provide for and listen to?" Tom joked.
"It gets even stranger," I told
him. "Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had
seven kits."
"Kits, cats, sacks, wives. This must
have been the oddest procession. How did each woman carry seven sacks, each
with seven cats in it and each of their seven kits? That seems quite
impossible," Tom exclaimed.
"Yes, it was the oddest sight,
indeed. The cats and kits were all rather small actually, much smaller than
your average cat and kitten. I suppose that helped some. There were bags hanging
all over these women, though. It was like they were pack mules, all trailing
one another as if in some strange parade."
"This will make a good story to tell
the other folk in the village," Tom said shaking his head.
"Oh, I intend to," I told him.
"In fact, I'm going to make a riddle out of it. Let's see if you can
figure it out."
"Let's see if we can all figure it
out," Tom replied, climbing over his fence. We headed into the heart of
the village and gathered everyone together to hear my ingenious riddle. Once
everyone was settled and quite, I began.
"As I was going to St. Ives I met a
man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each
cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives. How many were there going to St.
Ives?"
There was silence while everyone pondered
the question on their own, but soon they were working as a group trying to
solve it.
"Well seven cats in a bag with seven
kits each makes 49 right?" one man asked.
"No, you dolt," his wife scolded
him. "There are 49 kits plus the 7 cats which makes 56 in one sack."
"If there are 7 sacks of 56 on a
wife... what's 56 times 7?" the baker wondered.
"392," answered his boy, who
he'd sent to university through his hard labor.
"If that's how many are on each of
the 7 wives... what's 392 time 7?" the butcher chimed in. It took the boy
a little while longer to come up with the sum this time.
"2744," he finally answered.
"Plus the 7 wives makes 2751!"
"That's wrong," I said, shaking
my head.
"You forgot the man!" someone
said. "It's 2752!"
"That's still incorrect," I
informed them smugly, enjoying my little game. They started through the whole
problem again, this one yelling at that one for not counting right. I thought
the whole village would get into a row if I didn't stop them and give them the
answer.
"Alright, alright!" I called
over the roar of the crowd, bringing them back to attention. "I'll tell
you the answer."
The silence was so deep you might have
been able to hear the feet of the man and his wives somewhere far down the
road.
"The answer is one," I said,
very satisfied with myself that I had tricked them all. "I was
the one going to St. Ives. I met them on the road but they were going to other
direction." The whole crowd laughed at how silly they had been and then
began to ask questions about the man and all his wives and cats. Every time
someone from my village met someone not from the village, they would tell them
the St. Ives riddle. It was of the most well-known riddles, but very few get
the answer right on the first try.
--------------------------
Author's Note: This story is built around the riddle As I Was Going to St. Ives from the Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang (1897). The riddle the narrator tells in my story is the exact same as the riddle in the book. I just added a story around the riddle and gave the answer to the riddle because one isn't given in the book. There has always been a dispute, though, about what the "real" answer is. Some people count up only all the people, some include the cats, some even include the sacks for some odd reason. Personally, I think "one" is the right answer because many riddles try to distract you with extraneous information when the answer is actually really simple.
