Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/274

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A widow's son accepts the challenge of Tsamathòs, a super-human being who is represented as making the earth to tremble with his tread, and as bearing on his shoulder an uprooted tree, from the branches of which dangle wild beasts. The widow's son prevails against Tsamathòs, who begs him to desist and declare who are his parents. The youth replies that his mother was a widow when he was born, but that he resembles his father, and intends to surpass him in prowess. Tsamathòs goes with him to the house of the widow, and is by her poisoned at supper.

In this story a widow's son, on questioning his mother concerning his father, is sent by her, according to the orders of the latter, to the distant city of which he is king.

As the name signifies "of two races" or "species", it appears, I venture to think, highly probable that these stories of "Widows' Sons" may point to some such intercourse between higher and lower races as that suggested by Mr. Stuart-Glennie. Another allusion to difference of race is found in the "Beardless Man"—that is to say, a man with one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Mongolian and Negro, as distinguished from the White Races.

—My attention has just been drawn to Mr. Sidney Hartland's "Report on Folk-tale Research", in the last number of, in which he remarks that I have failed to give the sources of some of the tales contained in The Women of Turkey. Will you allow me to say that