MacGirdie’s Mare
, used by degrees to eat less and less, but just as he had reduced her to a straw a day the poor beast died. This is an old Greek joke, which is well known to schoolboys who have been taught the Analecta Minõra. (See Waverley, p. 54.)
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Entry taken from
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.