Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/465

Rh powers, the same enmity to the hero's race, even as the nâgnî or serpent-woman is just a woman of her kind, with all the nâg's attributes, humanity, habits, and powers. In their struggles with the human or heroic races their methods, though necessarily differing from those of the males of their class, are in each case of the same nature. Thus, instead of directly fighting mankind or the heroic opponents, they seek to destroy them by winning them over by female blandishments, and so getting them into the power of themselves and their party.

Besides what may be called the heroine proper of a legend or folktale, the child miraculously born and predestined to great deeds, the legitimate pride and glory of the tribe or race, there is the foundling, that kind of child which has come irregularly or illegitimately into the tribal or family circle, to play an important part therein. The career of the foundling may be expected to attract the imagination of a peasantry. Such an unexpected and unlooked-for addition to the family or tribe is sure to be interesting and to give rise to hereditary tales. But apart from the interest attaching to the conditions under which foundlings are introduced, the exigencies of native life serve to create and maintain foundling-stories. So many sub-castes and tribes and so many families of the upper ranks have from the native point of view a doubtful origin, so many of the richer people, who can pay for bards and their flatteries, have a blot on their escutcheons—a bar sinister, as one may call it—that tales of foundling girls are bound to flourish in order to connect families, castes, tribes, and prominent personages of the day with those of bygone times, whose position and claims are held to be beyond all doubt. Ancestor-making and genealogy-inventing are arts well understood in India, especially by the bardic class; and the story of the foundling mother of the eponymous hero is the most cherished resort for the purpose. In the Panjab, that land of great rivers, the river-borne foundling