NOTES. (continued 2)

5. The prince makes his escape at five years old. Jeruslan Jeruslanowitsch at the same age sets out in search of his father, Jeruslan Lasarewitsch, equipped as a knight, at p. 250 of the 17th Russian Maerchen in the collection by Dietrich quoted above. He meets and fights bravely with his father, proving himself worthy of him (p. 251). Sohrab, Rustam’s famous son, gives proof of a lion’s courage at five, and at ten years old vanquishes all his companions (Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 115).

6. The princess chooses the ugly common-looking man. In Old Deccan Days, p. 119, so does the Princess Buccoulee. In the episode of Nala and Damayantí we have the assemblage of suitors, and the public choice of a husband by a princess (svayamvara). Damayantí recognizes the mortal Nala among the gods, (each of whom has made himself resemble Nala) from the fact that the flowers of which Nala’s garlands were composed had faded while the garlands of the gods were blooming freshly. In a story from Manípúrí told by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary, September 1875, vol. IV. p. 260, Prince Basanta, effectually disguised by misery, and travel-stained, arrives with the merchant at a certain place where the king’s daughter that day is to choose her husband. The merchant takes his seat among the princely suitors; Basanta a little way off. There is a general storm of scoffings when the princess hangs her garland of flowers round Basanta’s neck. In one of Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian stories, “Von einem muthigen Königssohn, der viele Abenteuer erlebte,” vol. II. p. 21, we have three kings’ sons (brothers) and three princesses (sisters.) The two elder brothers marry the two elder sisters. At a tournament held on purpose that she may choose her husband, the youngest sister, to the general disgust, chooses the youngest prince (disguised as the dirty, ill-dressed servant of the court tailor), and who is not even present as a suitor. Her suitors, princes, have passed before her for three days. After the marriage the prince keeps up the disguise. His brothers by way of amusing themselves at his expense take “Stupid Peppe,” as they call him, to the wood to shoot birds; he shoots a great number, while they run here and there and cannot find one. They agree to let him brand them with black spots on their shoulders, on condition he gives them his birds. In the notes to this story, vol. II. p. 240. Herr Köhler gives Spanish, Russian, South Siberian, and others parallels. And in Stier’s Ungarische Volksmaerchen, p. 61, in the story of “Weissnittle,” we have not only the hero-horse mentioned in paragraph 4 of these notes, but also the assemblage of suitors for the princess to choose her husband: her choice of a seemingly stupid gardener’s boy, who has partially revealed himself to her; the prince retaining his disguise, after his marriage, towards every one, even his wife: two brothers-in-law, who are kings’ sons and the wife’s elder sisters’ husbands; their hunting on three different days, each time meeting a handsome prince in whom they do not recognize their despised brother-in-law, Weissnittle, who sells them his game the first day for their wedding-rings, the second for leave to brand them with these rings on their foreheads, the third for permission to brand them with a gallows on their backs: lastly, we have Weissnittle, as a splendid young prince, publicly shaming his brothers-in-law by exposing their branding marks. In India this branding with red-hot pice was the punishment for stealing. Compare in Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug, p. 411, Amír Ali’s horror at being so branded by the Rájá of Jhalone. It was, he says years later, a punishment worse than death, as the world would think him a thief, and he would carry to his grave “a mark only set on the vile and the outcasts from society.”

7. Múniyá tells me that, in a variation of this story, the dog, cow, and horse each swallow the child three times, but for shorter periods, as he is only five years old when he escapes on Kaṭar. Then when the princess chooses her husband she rides three times round the assemblage of Rájá’s, who all sit on a great plain, and each time she chooses the pretended old man; for in this version the boy loses his youth as well as his good looks. Instead of taking service with the grain merchant, the boy is told by his horse to go boldly to the king’s palace and ask for service there. The shaming of the brothers-in-law happens thus. The boy invites these princes, the king, all the king’s servants, and all the people in the king’s country, to a grand entertainment in the king’s court-house. When they are all assembled he has the six princes stripped and every one mocks at the pice-marks on their backs. These are the only variations in the other version.

Sir George Grey, in his Polynesian Mythology, p. 73, tells how the hero Tawhaki when he climbed into heaven in search of his lost wife “disguised himself, and changed his handsome and noble appearance, and assumed the likeness of a very ugly old man.” If fact, he looks such a thoroughly common old man that in the heavens he is taken for a slave instead of a great chief, and treated as such.

XXI.—THE BÉL-PRINCESS.

To story1. Múniyá says that telling the prince he would marry a Bél-Princess was equivalent to saying he would not marry at all, for these brothers’ wives knew she lived in the fairy-country, and that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the prince to find her, and take her from it.

2. With the fakír’s sleep compare that of the dragon who sleeps for a year at a time in the Transylvanian story “Das Rosenmaerchen” (Siebenbuergische Maerchen, pp. 124, 126).

3. In a Greek story, “Das Schloss des Helios” (Schmidt’s Griechische Maerchen, Sagen und Volkslieder, p. 106), the heroine is warned by a monk that as she approaches the magic castle voices like her brothers’ voices will call her; but if, consequently, she looks behind she will become stone. Her two elder brothers go to seek her, and, as they meet no monk to warn them, they become stone. The third brother meets the monk, obeys his warning, and thus, like his sister, escapes the evil fate. To save him from Helios, the sister turns him into a thimble till she has Helios’s promise to do him no harm. (Compare the Tiger and Tigress, p. 155 of this collection.) Helios gives him some water in a flask with which he sprinkles the stone brothers, whereupon they and all the other stone princes come to life. In these Indian tales the healing blood from the little finger plays the part of the waters of life and death, found in so many Russian and other European stories.

When reading of the fate of all these princes, it is impossible not to think of Lot’s wife.

The danger of looking back, when engaged on any dealings with supernatural powers, is insisted on in the tales and practices of the Russians, Eskimos, Zulus, and the Khonds of Orissa. In Russia the watcher for the golden fern-flower must seize it the instant it blossoms and run home, taking care not to look behind him: whether through fear of giving the demons, who also watch for it, power over him, or whether through a dread of the flower losing its magic powers if this precaution is neglected, Mr. Ralston does not say (Songs of the Russian People, p. 99). When “the Revived who came to the under-world people” (Dr. Rink tells us in his Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, p. 299) took the old couple to visit the ingnersuit (supernatural beings “who have their abodes beneath the surface of the earth, in the cliffs along the sea-shore, where the ordinarily invisible entrances to them are found” ib. p. 46), he warned “them not to look back when they approached the rock which enclosed the abode of the ingnersuit, lest the entrance should remain shut for them.... When they had reached the cliff, and were rowing up to it, it forthwith opened; and inside was seen a beautiful country, with many houses, and a beach covered with pebbles and large heaps of fish and matak (edible skin). Perceiving this the old people for joy forgot the warning and turned round, and instantly all disappeared: the prow of the boat knocked right against the steep rock and was smashed in, so that they all were thrown down by the shock. The son [the revived] said, ‘Now we must remain apart for ever.’” Mr. Tylor, in the 2nd volume of his Primitive Culture, at p. 147 mentions a Zulu remedy for preventing a dead man from tormenting his widow in her dreams; the sorcerer goes with her to lay the ghost, and when this is done “charges her not to look back till she gets home:” and he says the Khonds of Orissa, when offering human sacrifices to the earth-goddess bury their portions of the offering in holes in the ground behind their backs without looking round (ib. p. 377).

4. In most of the stories of this kind the command is to open the fruit or casket only near water, for if the beautiful maiden inside cannot get water immediately she dies. Such is the case in the “Drei Pomeranzen” (Stier’s Ungarische Maerchen und Sagen, p. 83), in “Die Schoene mit dem sieben Schleier” (Sicilianische Maerchen, vol. I. p. 73), and in “Die drei Citronen” (Schmidt’s Griechische Maerchen, Sagen und Volkslieder, p. 71). “Die Ungeborene Niegesehene” (Schott’s Wallachische Maerchen, p. 248) must be compared with these, though the beautiful maiden does not come out of the golden fairy-apple. She appears suddenly and the prince must give her water to drink and the apple to eat, before he can take her and keep her. In all these stories the hero has a long journey, and encounters many dangers, in seeking his bride. In the Sicilian story he is helped by hermits; in the Greek story, by a monk—monks in Greek and hermits in Sicilian and Servian stories playing the part of the fakírs in these Indian tales. In all these stories, too, the maiden is killed or transformed by a wicked woman who takes her place. In the Wallachian and Sicilian fairy tales the rightful bride becomes a dove only. But in the Hungarian tale she is drowned in a well and becomes a gold fish; the wicked gipsy has no rest till she has eaten the fish’s liver: from one of its scales springs a tree; she has the tree cut down and burnt. The wood-cutter who hews down the tree makes a cover for his wife’s milk-pot from a piece of the wood, and they find their house kept in beautiful order from this moment. So to discover the secret, they peep through the keyhole one day and see a lovely fairy come out of the milk-jar. Then they enter their house suddenly and the girl tells her story: the wood-cutter’s wife burns the wooden lid to force her to keep her own form, and goes to the king’s son to tell him where he will find his Pomegranate-bride again. In the Greek story a Lamnissa eats the citron-girl, but a tiny bone falls unnoticed into the water and becomes a gold-fish. The prince not only takes the Lamnissa home with him, but he takes the gold-fish too, and keeps it in his room, “for he loved it dearly.” The Lamnissa never rests till he gives her the fish to eat. Its bones are thrown into a garden and from them springs a rose bush on which blooms a rose which the king’s old washerwoman wishes to break off to sell it at the castle. From out of the bush springs the beautiful citron-maiden, and tells the old woman her story. She also gives her the rose for the king’s son, and in the basket with the rose she lays a ring he had given her, but charges the old woman to say nothing about her to him. The next day he comes to the old woman’s cottage and finds his real bride.

5. The youngest prince alone can gather the lotus-flower and bél-fruit. Compare the Pomegranate-king, pp. 10 and 11, and paragraphs 1 and 4, pp. 245, 252, of the notes to that story. In his Northern Mythology, vol. I., in the footnotes at p. 290, Thorpe mentions a maiden’s grave from which spring “three lilies which no one save her lover may gather.” I think he must quote from a Danish ballad.

6. The princess after drowning is first in a lotus-flower; then in a bél-fruit again; and, lastly, her body is changed to a garden and palace. Signor de Gubernatis at p. 152 of the 1st volume of his Zoological Mythology mentions an Esthonian story where a girl (she who addressed the crow as “bird of light”—see paragraph 2, p. 259 of the notes to “Brave Hírálálbásá”) while fleeing with her lover is thrown into the water by a magic ball sent after them by the old witch, and there becomes “a pond-rose (lotus-flower).” Her lover eats hogs’-flesh and thus learns the language of birds, and then sends swallows to a magician in Finnland to ask what he must do to free his bride. The answer is brought by an eagle; and the prince following the magician’s instructions helps the girl to recover her human form. And just as Surya Bai is born again in her mango (Old Deccan Days, p. 87) and the Bél-Princess in her bél-fruit, so is the girl in the Hottentot tale of “The Lion who took a woman’s shape” born from her heart in the calabash full of milk in which her mother has put it. The lion had eaten the girl; but her mother burns the lion and persuades the fire in which she burns him to give her her daughter’s heart (Bleek’s Hottentot Fables and Tales, pp. 55 and 56). With the change into the garden and palace compare the Russian story of a maiden whose servant-girl blinds her and takes her place as the king’s wife. After some time the false queen learns her mistress is still living; so she has her murdered and cut to pieces. “Where the maiden is buried a garden arises, and a boy shows himself. The boy goes to the palace and runs after the queen, making such a din that she is obliged, in order to silence him, to give him the girl’s heart which she had kept hidden. The boy then runs off contented, the king follows him, and finds himself before the resuscitated maiden” (Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. I. pp. 218, 219). See paragraphs 7 and 8 of the notes to “Phúlmati Rání,” p. 244, and 1, 3 and 4, pp. 245, 250, 252, of those to “The Pomegranate-king.”

7. The commonplace fate of the wonderful palace is deplorable.

XXII.—HOW THE RÁJÁ’S SON WON THE PRINCESS LABÁM.

To story1. The “four sides” in this story (p. 153), the “four directions” (p. 156) which ought to have been translated four sides and the four sides in “The Bed,” p. 202, are the four points of the compass. They appear in a Dinájpur story told by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary, 5th April 1872, p. 115. In the first Russian fairy tale published by Dietrich, the hero’s parents give their elder sons permission “to go on the four sides” when they start on their journeys (Russische Volksmaerchen, p. 1). In another fairy tale in the same collection (No. 11, p. 144) the Prince Malandrach, when he has lost his way flying in the air and is over the sea, raises himself by a last effort and looks on all the “four sides” in search of a resting-place for his foot, p. 147. Of course, too, like orthodox Russians, the Russian heroes generally bow to all the “four sides,” before attempting their journeys and adventures.

2. Híráman is the name of a kind of parroquet. Irik in the Bohemian tale “Princess Golden-Hair” (Naake’s Slavonic Fairy Tales, p. 99) first hears of the princess’s existence from the chattering of birds.

3. “Aunty” was the word used in English by old Múniyá.

4. With the stone bowl compare the pot in Grimm’s “Der suesse Brei,” Kinder und Hausmaerchen, vol. II. p. 104.

5. With the tigers’ coats compare the robes of honour wherewith the knights in the Mabinogion clothe themselves when they go to combat. “And he (Gwalchmai) went forth to meet the knight (Owain), having over himself and his horse a satin robe of honour sent him by the daughter of the Earl of Rhangyw; and in this dress he was not known by any of the host” (“The Lady of the Fountain,” Mabinogion, vol. I. p. 67). Peredur wears “a bright scarlet robe of honour over his armour” given him by the king’s daughter (ib. p. 363 of “Peredur the son of Evrawc”). And in “The Dream of Rhonabwy” a knight and his horse wear a robe of honour (ib. vol. II. p. 413).

6. With the tigers’ fight with the demons compare the combat of the grateful lion with the giant, in which the lion bears the brunt of the battle. On the giant’s saying, “Truly, I should find no difficulty in fighting with thee were it not for the animal that is with thee,” Owain shuts the lion up in the castle. “The lion in the castle roared very loud, for he heard that it went hard with Owain,” so he climbed to the top of the castle, sprang down and “joined Owain. And the lion gave the giant a stroke with his paw, which tore him from his shoulder to his hip, and his heart was laid bare. And the giant fell down dead” (“The Lady of the Fountain,” Mabinogion, vol. I. pp. 79, 80).

7. Gubernatis in vol. I. p. 160, of his Zoological Mythology, says, “The drum or kettle-drum thunder is a familiar image in Hindu poetry, and the gandharvas, the musician warriors of the Hindu Olympus, have no other instrument than the thunder.” “The magic flute is a variation of the same celestial instrument,” ib. p. 161.

8. For the hair, see note to “How King Burtal became a Fakír,” paragraph 2, p. 268.

XXIII.—THE PRINCESS WHO LOVED HER FATHER LIKE SALT.

To story1. With the task of pulling out the needles, the purchase of the maid-servant, the sleep of the princess, the usurping of her place by the maid who makes the prince believe the princess is her servant-girl, compare “Der böse Schulmeister und die wandernde Königstochter,” in Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Maerchen, vol. I. p. 59. Here, too, the princess is driven forth from her home; she finds a prince lying dead with a tablet by him on which is written, “If a maiden will rub me seven years, seven months and seven days long with grass from Mount Calvary, I shall return to life, and she shall become my wife” (p. 61).

2. Sun-jewel box. The word thus translated is Rav-ratan-ke-pitárá. Raví, sun; ratan, jewel; pitárá, a kind of box.

3. In one of Grimm’s stories, “Die Gänsehirtin am Brunnen,” Kinder und Hausmaerchen, vol. II. p. 419, a king asks his three daughters how much they love him (p. 425). The eldest loves him as much as the “sweetest sugar,” the second as much as her “finest dress,” and the third as much as salt. So her father in a rage has a sack of salt bound on her back, and makes two of his servants take her away to the forest. See also Auerbach’s Barfüssele, Stuttgart, 1873, ss. 236, 237.

XXIV.—THE DEMON IS AT LAST CONQUERED BY THE KING’S SON.

To story1. The leading idea of this story is the same as that in “Brave Hírálálbásá.”

2. With this demon as a goat, compare the Rakshas in the Pig’s Head Soothsayer in Sagas from the Far East, p. 63, and the Rakshas in a Bengáli story printed by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary, 7th June, 1872, p. 120. This last story opens with seven labourers, brothers, six of whom go down to the water to drink and never return. The seventh goes to see what has happened to them, and finds, instead of his brothers, a goat which is really a Rakshas. This goat then turns into a beautiful woman who marries the king, first making him give into her hands the eyes of his queen, who is sent blind into the forest, where she bears a little son. The Rakshas wife learns this, and when the boy later takes service with the king she sends him three times to her people in Ceylon, with orders to them to kill him. He has to bring her foam from the sea, a wonderful rice which is sown, ripens, and can be boiled in one day, and a singular cow. With the help of a Sannyásí (a Bráhman of the fourth order, a religious mendicant), he does these errands safely. The Rakshases in Ceylon receive him as their sister’s son, show him his own mother’s eyes and the clay with which they can be set again in any human sockets, a lemon which contains the life of the tribe, and a bird in which is that of the Rakshas-queen. The boy cuts up the lemon, and thereby kills them all, carries her eyes to his mother, and kills the Rakshas-queen by killing the bird. In this story, as in “Brave Hírálálbásá,” the Rakshas-queen takes her own fearful form on seeing her danger.

3. The Bargat, fig-tree, is the Ficus Bengalensis of Linnæus.

4. Múniyá sends her hero for a Garpank’s feather; Garpank I can find in no dictionary, but have ventured to translate it by eagle, as she says it is like a kite, only very much bigger; she sent us to see a statue of a garpank that stood over a gateway in a street in Calcutta, which might be that of an eagle or of a huge hawk. She said such birds did not exist in Bengal, and that it was not the Garuḍa (the sovran of the feathered race and vehicle of Vishṇu, Benfey). Gubernatis, in the 2nd volume of his Zoological Mythology, p. 189, tells a story from Monferrat where a king is blind, and can only be cured by “bathing his eyes in oil with a feather” of a griffin that lives on a high mountain. His third and youngest son catches and brings him one of the griffins and the king regains his sight.

5. Winning the gratitude of a bird by killing the snake or dragon that year after year devours its young birds is such a common incident in fairy tales, that I will only mention two instances. One occurs in a Dinájpur tale published by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary for 5th April, 1872, p. 145, where the hero saves the young birds from the snake. They tell the old birds. He lies under the tree and listens to the old birds relating how he will find the tree with the silver stem and golden branches he has come to seek. The other occurs at pp. 119, 110, of a story collected by Vogl (Volksmaerchen [Slavonic], p. 79) called Schön-Jela. In this tale the hero is sheltered in the dreadful underground wilderness by a hermit. Here there is the gigantic bird, Einja, who every third year has a brood of four young birds which a dragon as regularly devours. The hero, Prince Milan, watches by the nest for the dragon and kills him. The young birds, overjoyed, fly out of the nest and cover the hero with their wings till the old bird on her return asks who has saved them. Then they unfold their wings and she sees Prince Milan. In return she carries him to the upper world.

6. The word translated “night-growing rice” is Rát-vashá-ke-dhán; and the ayah’s description of this rice is given in the story. In this description she spoke of it as cháwal, the common word for uncooked rice, and said the Rakshas wished to drink its kánjí-pání (rice-water). As it is a fairy plant I am afraid it is hopeless trying to find its botanical name. Unluckily, Dr. George King says vashá is not rice at all. This is what he wrote to me on the subject: “Vashá is, I suppose, the same as vasaka, and in that case is Justitia Adhatoda, a straggling shrub common over the whole of India [very unlike the Rát-vashá-ke-dhán] and which was in the Sanscrit as it is in the native pharmacopœias. It is not a kind of rice, but belongs to the natural order of Acanthaceæ (the family to which Acanthus and Thunbergia belong).” This night-growing rice may be compared to the day-growing rice in paragraph 2, p. 288, of the notes to this story.

7. Compare with the paper boat the rolled-up burdock leaf given to the hero by the dwarf in the seventh Esthonian tale quoted by Gubernatis (Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 155): whenever this hero wishes to cross water he unrolls his burdock-leaf. Gubernatis compares this leaf to the lotus-leaf on which the Hindús represented their god as floating in the midst of the waters (ibid.).

8. With the great wind that comes from the demon, compare the following Swedish account of a giant in Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, vol. II. p. 85. He asks his road of a lad, who directs him: then “he went off as in a whirlwind, and the lad now discovered, to his no small astonishment, that his forefinger with which he had pointed out the way had followed along with the giant.” In the old Scandinavian belief the Giant Hræsvelgr sat at the end of heaven in an eagle’s garb (arna ham). From the motion of his wings came the wind which passed over men (ib. vol. I. p. 8). It must be mentioned also that “in the German popular tales the devil is frequently made to step into the place of the giants” (ib. vol. I. p. 234), and that Stöpke or Stepke is in Lower Saxony an appellation of the devil or of the whirlwind, from which proceed the fogs which spread over the land (ib. p. 235). The devil sits in the whirlwind and rushes howling and raging through the air (Mark Sagen, ib. p. 377). The whirlwind is also ascribed to witches. If a knife be cast into it, the witch will be wounded and become visible (Schreiber’s Taschenbuch, 1839, p. 323; ib. vol. I. p. 235). Mr. Ralston, in his Songs of the Russian People, p. 382, says the Russian peasant attributes whirlwinds to the mad dances in which the devil celebrates his marriage with a witch, and at p. 155 of the same book tells us how the malicious demon Lyeshy not only makes use of the whirlwind as a travelling conveyance for himself and a means of turning intruders out of quarters he had selected for his own refuge, but sends home in it people to whom he is grateful. In Ireland we find a wind blowing from hell. King Loegaire tells Patrick, “I perceived the wind cold, icy, like a two-ridged spear, which almost took our hair from our heads and passed through us to the ground. I questioned Benén as to this wind. Said Benén to me, ‘This is the wind of hell which has opened before Cúchulainn.’” Lebar na huidre, p. 113 a. This “wind of hell” makes one think of the sweet-scented wind from the mid-day regions, and the evil-scented wind from the north, which in old Persian religious belief blew to meet pure and wicked souls after death (Tylor’s Primitive Culture, vol. II. pp. 98, 99). Mr. Tylor mentions also the Fanti negroes’ belief that the men and animals they sacrifice to the local fetish are carried away in a whirlwind imperceptibly to the worshippers (ib. p. 378).

8. Ábjhamjham-ke pání is what has been translated by “water from the glittering well.”

9. The king had a great pit dug in the jungle. This is how Kai and Bedwyr plucked out the beard of Dillus Varvawc, which had to be plucked out during life. They made him eat meat till he slept. “Then Kai made a pit under his feet, the largest in the world, and he struck him a violent blow, and squeezed him into the pit. And there they twitched out his beard completely with the wooden tweezers; and after that they slew him altogether” (“Kilhwch and Olwen,” Mabinogion, vol. II. p. 304).

XXV.—THE FAN PRINCE.

To story1. The boat would not move because the king had forgotten to get the thing his youngest daughter had asked him to bring her. Signor de Gubernatis (Zoological Mythology, vol. II. p. 382) mentions an unpublished story from near Leghorn in which a sailor promises to bring his youngest daughter a rose. The eldest daughter is to have a shawl, and the second a hat. “When the voyage is over, he is about to return, but having forgotten the rose, the ship refuses to move; he is compelled to go back to look for a rose in a garden; a magician hands the rose with a little box to the father to give it to one of his daughters, whom the magician is to marry. At midnight, the father, having returned home, relates to his third daughter all that had happened. The little box is opened; it carries off the third daughter to the magician, who happens to be King Pietraverde, and is now a handsome young man.”

2. The princess’s ring recalls Portia and Nerissa.

3. A yogí is a Hindú religious mendicant.

XXVI.—THE BED.

To storyThe merchant’s son possibly was afraid of incurring the wrath either of an original spirit residing in the tree, or of some human soul who had been born again as its genius (see paragraph 1, p. 276, of note to “The fakír Nánaksá saves the merchant’s life”). Múniyá could give no reason for his asking each tree’s permission to cut it down.

XXVII.—PÁNWPATTÍ RÁNÍ.

To storySee another version of this tale in the Baital Pachísi, No. 1. There the heroine is called Padmávatí, and her father King Dantavát.

XXVIII.—THE CLEVER WIFE.

To story1. The merchant’s wife tricks the four men into chests. Upakosá makes the like appointments, and plays a similar trick: compare her story translated from the Kathápítha by Dr. G. Bühler in the Indian Antiquary for 4th October, 1872, pp. 305, 306: and in “The Touchstone,” a Dinájpur legend told by Mr. G. H. Damant at p. 337 of the Indian Antiquary for December, 1873, the hero-prince’s second wife, Pránnásiní, in order to regain the touchstone for her husband (like Upakosá and the Clever Wife) makes appointments with, and then tricks, the kotwál, the king’s councillor, the prime minister, and lastly the king himself.

2. She plays cards (tás). Forbes in his Hindústání and English Dictionary p. 543, says tás is the word used for Indian playing cards. The Indian pack, he says, contains eight suits, each suit consisting of a king, wazír, and ten cards having various figures represented on them from one to ten in number.

[A close parallel to this tale is Adi’s Wife, a Bengáli legend from Dinagepore, told by the late Mr. Damant in the Indian Antiquary for January, 1880, p. 2.]

XXIX.—RÁJÁ HARICHAND’S PUNISHMENT.

To story1. This king is probably the same as “The Upright King,” Harchand Rájá, p. 68 of this collection.

2. The Kop Shástra. Múniyá says kop is a Hindústání, not a Bengáli word, and has nothing whatever to do with demons. This is what Mr. Tawney writes on the subject: “It might mean kapi, or kapila if the woman is a Bengáli. Kapi is a name of Vishṇu, possibly it might be the Rámáyana as treating of monkeys, but I really do not know. I see Monier Williams says that there are certain demons called kapa. But of course kópa is anger. I suppose you know that the natives of Bengal pronounce the short a as o in the English word hop.” Múniyá pronounces kop like the English word cope. This Shástra seems as hopelessly mythical as the Rát-vashá-ke-dhán.

XXX.—THE KING’S SON AND THE WAZÍR’S DAUGHTER.

To storyIn a Servian story, “Des Vaters letzter Wille,” pp. 134, 135, 136, of the Volksmaerchen der Serben collected by Karadschitsch, the youngest brother has to take his brother-in-law’s horse over a bridge under which he sees an immense kettle full of boiling water in which men’s heads are cooking while eagles peck at them. He then passes through a village where all is song and joyfulness because, so the inhabitants tell him, each year is fruitful with them and they live, therefore, in the midst of plenty. Then he sees two dogs quarrelling which he cannot succeed in separating. He next passes through a village where all is sorrow and tears because each year comes hail, so the inhabitants “have nothing.” Next he sees two boars fighting together and cannot separate them any more than he could part the dogs. Lastly, he reaches a beautiful meadow. In the evening his brother-in-law expounds the meaning of all he has seen. The heads in the boiling vessel represent the everlasting torment in the next world. The happy villagers are good, charitable men, with whom God is well pleased. The dogs are his elder brothers’ wives. The sorrowing villagers are men who know neither righteousness, concord, nor God. The boars are his two wicked elder brothers. The meadow is paradise.