The source comes from the people. Toumanian wrote about it in the article – "How my "The Unlucky Merchants" became "американская".* "I heard the fable from my uncle in Lori, when I was a student, and it is one of my first writings in print. I only replaced "the water butterfly" with the gull. I used to write a lot of such things, folk fables and legends in dialect in the past (1885-1887), but I didn’t keep them, so they were lost here and there, only "The Dog and the Cat", and "The Unlucky Merchants" remained.

ONE day, the Bat and the Sea-gull met
And said, ‘Let us become merchants.’
And they put their heads together,
Argued out the terms and made a contract;
But, it so happened that they had no money!

* In Russian it means "American"

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