Doctor Know-All

A poor peasant named Crab, envious of a fortune-teller he once saw arrive at a rich house in a fine carriage, declared to his wife that he too would become a fortune-teller, adopting the grand title "Doctor Know-All" despite having no actual skill or training in anything of the sort, purely on a whim born of envy.

By sheer coincidence, a nobleman's valuable money soon went missing, and someone recommended the newly self-declared "Doctor Know-All" to identify the thief. Terrified but unable to refuse without exposing his fraud immediately, Crab agreed to investigate, secretly planning to simply stall and hope for the best. He was given a fine meal by four nervous servants who, unbeknownst to him, were the actual thieves.

As the first servant entered with food, Crab sighed dramatically to his wife (thinking himself alone), "There goes the first," referring only to the first course of the meal — but the guilty servant, believing himself identified, fled in terror and confessed to his companions. Each of the remaining three servants entering in turn heard some similarly innocent remark about "the second," "the third," and so on, and each, wracked with guilt, believed himself caught and confessed in turn. The stolen money was recovered entirely by accident, and Crab, half from luck and half from the servants' own guilty imaginations doing all the actual work, was hailed as a genius throughout the land — never once revealing, out of pure self-preservation, that he had known absolutely nothing at all from beginning to end. His fame endured for years, resting entirely on other people's willingness to see brilliance in what was really nothing but nervous coincidence.