Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/225

 Folk- Tales front the Punjab. 2 1 3

tame when with her. She rephed that for some time she had secretly been taking lessons from a great magician and that in two or three days she would be perfected if her father allowed her to continue the lessons. She also added that the dog seemed to her to be a human being, as his eyes were unlike that of a dog and that he resembled the Sultan of Ghazni.

Her father, the butcher, allowed her to finish her lessons in magic, which she did in a few days. She then told the dog that if he would marry her and make her his Sultana she would change him back again into a man. This of course he promised to do, and he was restored to his natural shape instantly.

The Sultan married the butcher's daughter and took her with him to his palace, where she turned his former wife into a mule. The Sultan ordered that everyone who saw the mule was to load her with heavy burdens, and being always over- laden she very soon expired. When the Sultan heard she was dead he gave a hundred rupees to the man in whose possession the mule died.

Lucas W. King.

Roumanian Tales.

Killing of the Old Men.

[Folk-Lore, vol. xxx. p. 136.')

I have just received the last number of the Roumanian Folk- Lore Review, Ion Creanga, of Nov. -Dec. 191 9. On pages 106-107 there, is a curious parallel to the story of which I have already given two other Roumanian parallels in the pages of our Journal. This new variant differs entirely from all the others known, hence my reason for reproducing it here in a somewhat abridged form. The Roumanian writer is rather prolix. The essential features of the tale are as follows :

In olden times in some distant country the young folk had come together and decided to get rid of the old men. They did not want their wisdom and their advice, for they were just as clever. They had lived their lives and that was an end of it.

p