Champa Ranee recognised the voice as Vicram's: he went on, "Will you go body and soul to heaven? Have you forgotten Polly's words?"

· Champa Ranee rushed into the temple, and, falling on her knees before the idol, cried out, Gracious Power, I have done all as you commended; let your words come true; save me, take me to heaven."

But the parrot above her cried, "Good bye, Champa Ranee, good bye; you ate a chicken's head, not mine. Where is your house now? Where are your servants and all your possessions? Have my words come true, think you, or yours?"

Then the woman saw all, and in her rage and despair, cursing her own folly, she fell violently down on the floor of the temple, and, dashing her head against the stone, killed herself."

It is impossible to question the real identity of these two stories, and incredible that the one could have been invented apart from the other, or that the German and the Hindoo tale are respectively mere derivatives from the same leading idea. This idea is that beings of no repute may be avengers of successful wrong-doers, or to put it in the language of St. Paul, that the weak things of the earth may be chosen to confound the strong, and foolish things to confound the wise. But it was highly improbable that this idea should of itself suggest to a Hindoo and a Teuton that the avenger should be a bird, that the wrong-doer should punish himself, and should seal his doom by swallowing his persecutor, or by at least thinking that he was devouring him. There is no room here for the argument which Professor Max Müller characterises as 'sneaking' when applied even to fables which are common to all the members of the Aryan family.* A series of incidents

* Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii. p. 233.

such as these could never have been thought out by two brains working apart from each other; and we are driven to admit that at least the machinery by which the result was to be brought about had been devised before the separation, or to maintain that the story has in the one case or the other been imported bodily.

But the story of the nautch-girl is only one incident in a larger drama. The bird of the German tale is a common sparrow; the parrot which brings about the death of Champaa Ranee is nothing less than the Maharajah Vicram who has received from the god of wisdom the power of transporting his soul into any other body, while by an antidote he keeps his own body from corruption. And here we are brought to a parallelism which cannot be accounted for on any theory of medieval importation. The story of Vicram is essentially the story of Hermotimos of Klazomenæ, whose soul wanders at will through space while his body remains undecayed at home, until his wife, tired out by his repeated desertions, burns his body while he is away, and thus effectually prevents his resuming his proper form. A popular Deccan tale, which is also told by Pliny and Lucian, must have existed, if only in a rudimentary state, while Greeks and Hindoos still lived as a single people. But a genuine humour, of which we have little more than a faint germ in the Greek legend, runs through the Hindoo story. In both the wife is vexed by the frequent absence of her husband; but the real fun of Anna de Souza's narrative rises from the complications produced by a carpenter's son, who overhears the god Gunputti as he teaches Vicram the mystic words which enables him to pass from his own body into another; but as he could not

was

see the antidote which Vicram received to keep his tenantless body from decay, the carpenter's son but half enlightened. No sooner, however, had Vicram transferred his soul to the parrot's body than the carpenter's son entered the body of Vicram and the work of corruption began in his own. The pseudo-rajah is at once detected by the Wuzeer Butti, who recommends the whole court to show a cold shoulder to the impostor and make his sojourn in Vicram's body as unpleasant as possible. Worn out at last with waiting, Butti sets off to search for his friend, and by good luck is one of the throng assembled to witness the ascension of Champa Ranee. Butti recognises his friend, and at once puts him into safe keeping in a cage. On reaching home it became necessary to get the carpenter's son out of Vicram's body, and the Wuzeer, foreseeing that this would be no easy task, proposes a butting match between two rams, the one belonging to himself, the other to the pseudo-rajah. Butti accordingly submits his own ram to a training, which greatly hardens his horns; and so when the fight began

The pretended rajah soon saw, to his vexation, that, his favourite's horns being less strong than its opponent's, he was getting tired and, beginning to lose courage, would soon be worsted in the fight; so, quick as thought, he left his own body and transported his soul into the ram's body, in order to give it an increase of courage and resolution and enable it to win.

No sooner did Vicram Maharajah, who was hanging up in a cage, see what had taken place, than he left the parrot's body and reentered his own body. Then Butti's ram pushed the other down on its knees, and the wuzeer ran and fetched a sword and cut off its head, thus putting an end, with the life of the ram, to the life of the carpenter's son.'

But fresh troubles were in store for Butti. Not yet cured of his wandering propensities, Vicram goes to sleep in a jungle with his mouth open, into which creeps a cobra, who refuses to be dislodged. The rajah in his intolerable misery leaves his home, disguised as a fakeer, and Butti seeks him in vain for twelve years. Meanwhile the beautiful Buccoulee, who had recognised her destined husband under the squalid rags of the fakeer, had succeeded in freeing Vicram from his tormentor; and thus all three returned to the long-forsaken Anar Ranee.

But before we examine incidents which take us into another region of Hindoo folk-lore, we are bound to show that these tales contain other stories which belong to the same class with the tale of the dancing-girl and the wood-cutter. There are some which are even more remarkable for their agreement in the general scheme with thorough divergence in detail. In the story entitled The Table, the Ass, and the Stick,' in Grimm's collection, a goat, whose appetite cannot be satisfied, brings a tailor into grievous trouble by leading him to drive his three sons away from their home on groundless charges. At last, finding that he had been cheated, he scourges the goat, which makes the best of its way from his dwelling. Meanwhile the three sons had each been learning a trade, and each received his reward. To the eldest was given a table which, at the words 'Cover thyself, at once presented a magnificent banquet; the second received a donkey which, on hearing the word 'Bricklebrit,' rained down gold pieces; and both were deprived of their gifts by a thievish innkeeper, to whom they had in succession revealed their secret. On reaching home the eldest son, boasting to his father

of his inexhaustible table, was discomfited by finding that some common table had been put in its place; and the second in like manner, in making trial of his ass found himself in possession of a very ordinary donkey. But the youngest son had not yet returned, and to him they sent word of the scurvy behaviour of the innkeeper. When the time of his departure came, his master gave him a sack, adding, 'In it there lies a stick.' The young man took the sack as a thing that might do him good service, but asked why he should take the stick as it only made the sack heavier to carry. The stick, however, was endowed with the power of jumping out of the sack and belabouring anyone against whom its owner had a grudge; and thus armed the youth went cheerfully to the house of the innkeeper, who, thinking that the sack must certainly contain a treasure, tried to take it from the young man's pillow while he slept. But he had reckoned without his host. The stick hears the fatal word, and at once falls without mercy on the thief, who roars out that he will surrender the table and the ass. Thus the three gifts reach the tailor's house. As for the goat, whose head the tailor had shaven, it ran into a fox's house, where a bee stung its bald pate, and it rushed out, never to be heard of again.

In the Deccan tale we have a jackal and a barber in the place of the goat and the tailor; and the mischief is done, not by leading the barber to expel his children, but by cheating him of the fruits of his garden. The parallel, however, is not confined to the fact of the false pretences; the barber retaliates, like the tailor, and inflicts a severe wound on the jackal. As before, however, in the German story, the goat is a goat, but the jackal is a transformed rajah, none other in short