Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/498

 464 Some Azotes on East African Folklore.

Hundred Cows." This was recognized by Muhammad bin Ma'alim (my teacher at Mombasa) as " a Galla tale," and there are several points about it which make it not unlikely that he is right. It is ^^ fabliau of perhaps a not uncommon type, but, I venture to think, showing an outlook unlike that of the usual Arab story, both in the part taken by the wife and in the fact that the laugh is on what we should consider the right side. A young man, whose total posses- sions amounted to a hundred head of cattle, courted a rich man's daughter and paid away all his substance as her dowry. Having nothing left to live on, he went round to his neighbours and every day begged a little milk for him- self and his wife.^ After some months his father-in-law came to see him ; the young wife, in despair at having nothing to set before him, went into the house and cried, A little later, looking out of the back gate of the yard {ica), she saw an admirer whom hitherto she had put off with evasive answers, and, being assailed by him with reproaches, promised to give him a rendezvous later on, but explained the present embarrassing circumstances. The young man went away, and returned with a leg of beef, which was in due course cooked for the guest. The giver, happening to stroll past the front of the house, when the men were seated in the verandah, was invited to partake. When the meal was ready the woman called them, saying, " Come to dinner, you three simpletons ! " {zvapnnibafti watatic) — and the point of the tale lies in her explanation of this address. The father was a simpleton because, being a rich man, " owner of 6000 cattle," he had let his only child go for a dowry of lOO; the husband, because he had sought a wife so far above his position, whereas he might have found one

^This is quite alien to the customs of the Swahili, who never use milk as food, whereas it is the staple of Galla diet. The same thing holds, if we are to understand — according to Muhammad bin Ma'alim's explanation of the story — that he hired himself out to milk his neighbours' cows. Compare Folk-Lore^ xxiii., p. 285 sqq.