Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/530

 522 The king's daughter called out to her nurse, "Come here» a string of camels has fallen into my eye!" The nurse came, and, half-closing her eye, looked into the king's daughter's eye, and saw a herd of camels wandering about and grazing there. The nurse began to pick them out, hiding them in the knot of her pyjama string, and when she got to the last young camel she pulled it out, saying, "This young camel is what was in your eye." The king's daughter said, "I make you a present of it," and so the nurse carried off the whole herd!

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There was once a husbandman who had grown a crop of millet. When the millet was ripe a tiger appeared in the middle of the crop. The husbandman was sitting on a scaffolding in the middle of the field. The tiger said to him: "Get off and come down here; I am going to eat you." The husbandman replied: "I am very thin just now; give me time to feed myself upon green corn and sugarcane, and get fat, and then eat me." So every day the tiger used to come and say: "I am going to eat you," and the husbandman kept getting thinner and thinner through fear. His wife said to him: "What is the matter with you; you eat green corn and you eat sugarcane, and yet you keep getting thinner?" The man replied: "Every day a tiger comes and threatens to eat me. That is why I am getting thin, for fear that one day the tiger will eat me." His wife said: "What time does he come?" He replied: "He comes at midday." On this the wife dressed herself like a man, and mounted a mare, and girt herself with weapons, and came to the millet-field. She saw the tiger standing beneath the scaffolding, and her husband on the top. She called out: "Oh, farmer!" The man replied: