Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/198

 190 is not known whether he is dead or alive; but he left you behind him to be a burden on me."

When Donald heard this, he was thankful he did not shoot his son; so he marched in where the pair were, took the loaves of white bread off his back, and broke them on his wife's knee. Out of the first loaf tumbled the wages of the first seven years; out of the second, the wages of the second seven years, and out of the third the wages of the third seven years. Afterwards they lived together as happy as people could wish for.

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I have met with several popular European forms of this story, which is assuredly of Eastern extraction, and has, I daresay, been orally current in Gaelic "time out of mind". The Gaelic story could not have been taken from No. 103 of Swan's translation of the Anglo-Latin version of the Gesta Romanorum—which, by the way, does not occur in the old English translations of the Gesta edited by Sir F. Madden for the Roxburgh Club, and one edited by Mr. Herrtage for the Early English Text Society—since the incidents of the murder and the loaves are not found in the monkish tale, while they are at least in one European popular version besides the above.

There is a story in the Turkish collection called Quirq Vazir Tarikhi (History of the Forty Vazirs), which in the opening bears some resemblance to the Gaelic tale. It is the Lady's eighteenth recital in my learned friend Mr. E. J. W. Gibb's complete English translation of that storybook, and relates how a young cobbler sees a darivesh pass by his stall one day, wearing "shocking bad" shoes. He gives the devotee food and repairs his shoes, and then telling him that he is about to travel, requests the good man's counsel in return for his little services. The darivesh skives