[ WP ] You always hear people say , `` That 's the oldest trick in the book ! '' . Well , you just found that book .

*Ye Olde Booke of Trickes* 
 
 Could it be? In years of Indiana Jones-style rare book pursuit I'd seen only torn passages, coffee-stained colophons, and hastily scrawled notes in long-yellowed margins... yet here it was, in my own grandmother's fusty attic, buried beneath every *Reader's Digest* released between 1988 and 1993. 
 
 Forgetting for once the necessity of care with ancient texts, I flipped rapidly through, as if attempting to see a young lad in the bottom right corner Morph into a bear, shark, or tiger; it was indeed a catalog of Trickes, organized reverse-chronologically. On the final page, I found it, the `` Oldest Trick in the Book:'' 
 
 > Step One: Be thyself a snake in the Garden of Eden. 
 Step Two: Hove thyself in a Tree of Life. 
 Step Three: Offer yonder naked rubes an apple from said tree. 
 Step Four: Laugh with great vigor as rubes are thereafter divinely afflicted with disease, death, childbirth, etc. 
 
 `` Snakes,'' I grumbled. `` Why did it have to be *snakes*??''
