Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #15

Best known for illustrating many of Charles Dickens’s novels, the English artist and caricaturist George Cruikshank also provided artwork for a collection of riddles and puzzles called Guess Me, published in New York in 1879. Alongside dozens of puns, charades, word games, and a particularly fiendish set of near-impossible rebus puzzles (or “hieroglyphics”), the book also contained over 600 question-and-answer style riddles, or “conundrums.”  

Admittedly, some of these are just as tricky as the hieroglyphics: “Who was the inventor of butter stamps?” asks one conundrum, to which the answer is “Cadmus, for he first brought letters into Greece.” (To work that one out, you would need to figure out that Greece and grease are homophones, that the legendary hero Cadmus is credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet to ancient Greece, and, more importantly, what a butter stamp is.) Thankfully, the riddle below is at the simpler end of the conundrum scale, and can be figured out with a little lateral thinking. Can you solve it?

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