Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/582

518 door, bursts in indignantly, and the mandarin hurriedly dismisses his secretary, saying,—"My arbour also is about to fall on me." Some of the tales are curiously parallel to Western stories. No. LXIV. (How Rare are the Great Sages) is a Chinese version of the American stump-orator's "Lincoln is dead, Greeley is dead, and I don't feel very well myself." In No. LII. (Attraction of Music), a street musician thanks the one auditor who has stayed to the end, and is told that his patient hearer does not understand music, but has waited for another reason. No. LXXII. (Brotherly Cultivation of Fields) narrates a bargain about crops, of the Devil Outwitted type, in which one partner is cheated by getting one year what is above ground and the next year what is below ground, (the Chinese crops being potatoes and millet). Another far-travelled story is No. LXXXVI. (The Boaster), in which a monkey and a tiger, tied together to give them courage, flee before an unarmed boaster, who berates the monkey as his inefficient purveyor who is bringing him for food only a single thin wild cat. The other drolls deal mainly with instances of stupidity or ill-breeding, competitive bars, boasters, and travellers, and the corruption of magistrates and priests,—(in one story a tiger runs away from what he supposes to be a monk's subscription list),—and a large class depends on puns or conversational misunderstandings. The stories are mostly translated from popular tales gathered and brought into the Mandarin dialect by Baron Vitale, the editor of a well-known book of Pekingese rhymes. The pamphlet is both interesting and useful as throwing light on a little-known side of Chinese character and oral lore, and it well deserves a second edition, in which, by the way, the reference in No. LXXXI. to a district magistrate's Christian name should be amended.

Chinese Fables and Folk Stories are of less interest than the preceding pamphlet, although the writer of the introduction claims that this is the first book to bring Western people to a knowledge of Chinese fables. The collection is one made from literary sources, which, unfortunately, are not given, and seems for the most part to represent the "Goody Two Shoes" rather than the "Mother Goose" of Chinese literature. The tales also appear from internal evidence to be, at least to some extent, retold.