Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/252

 BY FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

For a long while past I have been making a large collection of Gypsy folktales gathered from many parts of Europe—Turkey, Roumania, Hungary, Poland, England, Wales, Scotland, and Spain. The first on my list is the following, told by an old Gypsy woman of Adrianople to the Gypsiologist and Byzantine antiquary, Alexander G. Paspati, M.D., who died at Athens in the Christmas week of 1891. He printed it and five more more Gypsy stories, in the original Rómani with a French translation, as a supplement to his Études sur les Tchinghianés on Bohémiens de l'empire Ottoman (Constantinople, 1870). My rendering is made from the original.

"A king had three sons. He gave the youngest a hundred thousand piastres; he gave the same to the eldest son and to the middle one. The youngest arose; he took the road; wherever he found poor folk he gave money; here, there, he gave it away; he spent the money. His eldest brother went, had ships built to make money. And the middle one went, had shops built. They came to their father.

What have you done, my son?'

I have built ships.'

"To the youngest, 'You, what have you done?'

I, every poor man I found, I gave him money, and for poor girls I paid the cost of their marriages.'

"The king said: 'My youngest son will care well for the poor. Take another hundred thousand piastres.'

"The lad departed. Here, there, he spent his money; twelve piastres remained to him. Some Jews dug up a corpse and beat it.

What want you of him, that you are beating him?'