Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/466

426 is the favourite variety. The girl infant is discovered floating by various methods down a river, is adopted by the finder, is married to the eponymous hero or his father, is subsequently traced to an aristocratic family, and the desired high-class connection is established. A dive into any of the accepted accounts of the more important families, or into the legendary history of the sub-tribes and sub-castes—even into that of the tribes and castes themselves—anywhere in India will produce many such stories in many quaint forms. They abound in the folktales and appear in the Legends of course.

Pretty and popular varieties of the foundling-tale are to be found in the many variants of the egg-hero story, where the little stranger, male or female, is fabled to have sprung miraculously from an egg, from fruit, from a box, a flower, or other small and fanciful article. And to the same category must, I think, be referred the universally popular sleeping-beauty. A careful survey of her life-history, the manner of her discovery, her doings and characteristics, point her out as the representative of the bride from the other side—raped it may be, or stolen, or abducted, or taken in fight as a sort of spolio opima, or perhaps simply found. Whatever she may be, princess in disguise, ogress born, or captive in a foreign land, she is emphatically not of the hero's race or party, and their union is always irregular—i.e. not according to established tribal custom.

In one essential point, arising out of the view taken by the peasantry of women and girls, the folk-heroine differs entirely from the hero. As the actual property of some male, either tabued to him or as part of his personal effects, the heroine has to be chaste. Of male chastity we do not hear much, except as virtue—i.e. manly capacity, which is quite a different idea from that attached to sexual chastity. Of virtue in the above sense a great deal is heard, and it is most jealously guarded. The terms usually rendered "pure" and "chaste," and so on, however, never imply