Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/262

 224 Reviews.

and) cooked him over the fire. And the swallow came, and the cock was in the pot ; and the swallow said, ' Take the gourds off the fire ; I want to go home ' {i.e.^ do not let us wait any longer for the cock). And the cock's wife emptied the pot, and she found the cock ; he was dead. And the swallow returned home without eating any mponda."

In the other version, the niengu (a small bird) serves the cat in the same way.

Among the Cinderella-stories is a charming one, " Le Petit Deteste," which introduces the hippopotamus in a novel character — we may say as a species of Dr. Barnardo. He keeps a nursery for deserted children at the bottom of the river. This incident seems to be peculiar to the Ronga tale, though in a story given by Jacottet, a mother entrusts her child to an old woma?i who lives under water.i

Space will not allow us to do more than call attention to the ogre stories, with the interesting remarks prefixed to them (we have come across the beings with one ear, one eye, one arm, one leg, &c.—see p. 197— in Mang'anja and Yao folklore), to the tale entitled "La Route du Ciel" (p. 237), which has a well-known analogue in Grimm, and to "Les Trois Vaisseaux" (in Contes Etrangers, p. 304), which probably comes ultimately from the Arabian Nights. A Swahili analogue is given in C. Velten, "Märchen u. Erzählungen der Suaheli," under the title "Mchumba wa ndugu watatu" ("The Bride of the Three Brothers"). That it is also known to the Yaos is proved by a variant written out by one of the scholars of Domasi Mission, and by him entitled "The Story of the Chief." (See Life and Work in British Central Africa—the Blantyre monthly paper—for November, 1898.)

A. Werner.

' Conies Popidaires des Bassoutos, p. T96. [In a variant, however, the old woman is replaced by a crocodile. And in another story of the same volume, when a mother has killed her child and beaten the body to dust which she flings into the river, a crocodile kneads the dust and fashions it anew until the dead child lives again. She remains under the care of the crocodile, but is ultimately restored to her parents, the crocodile promising a home and protection in case of any further ill-treament. Ibid. p. 233. — Ed.]