Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/102

94 several variants are given. The book is a contribution to our knowledge the more precious because we Western students have all-too-little information about the teeming superstitions still at large in the Russian empire.

Of original collections by far the most remarkable published during the past year is the Rev. Charles Swynnerton's Indian Nights' Entertainment. The stories it comprises were obtained in the Punjab, many of them at Ghâzi, on the Indus, thirty miles above Attock; and the illustrations with which it has been enriched are by native artists, and may be taken to exhibit the scenes of the tales as they present themselves to the native mind. This is a great help to understanding the details. The narratives consist as well of apologues, beast-tales, and drolls, as of ordinary märchen. A marked characteristic of the volume is the large number of stories turning on the cunning, or the folly, or the fidelity of woman. One such is a curious variant of the snake who wanted to kill the countryman who had saved his life. Here the catastrophe is wholly different from that of the fable with which we are acquainted. The story of the man who bought advice turns on the inability of women to keep secrets. Here, again, the plot is not that usually found in Europe, and the story has the appearance of being a modern combination of two originally distinct. A story of special interest is that of Ali the Merchant and the Brahmin. This is the magician's apprentice, who after leaving his master has a Transformation-fight with him. The apprentice at last becomes a mosquito, and hides in the nostrils of a corpse suspended from a tree. The magician stops up the nostrils with clay, and binds them round to prevent his opponent's escape. He then has to get someone to cut down the corpse and bring it away secretly. At this point the Baital Pachisi (Twenty-five Tales of a Demon)—or at least its plot, for happily the tale-teller has some sense of proportion—is interwoven as an episode in the Transformation-fight. The end of the fight, like that in the story of The Second Calender, and unlike most other variants, is disastrous to