Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/455

Rh scholars, are remarkably like this story. There are five of these, Blockhead, Dullard, Simpleton, Dunce, and Fool. Once when they have crossed a river with their master, one of them counts the party, and as he forgets to include himself, he can only make five, and they believe that one is drowned. A traveller gives each of them a blow on the back, and bids them count, and then the six reappear. Just in the same way the six Lalenbürgers, who are sitting in a circle, cannot find their own legs until they feel a blow on them. Guru loses his turban, and is indignant with his scholars for not having picked it up. "People ought to pick up everything," says he. One of them runs back, fetches the turban, but finds some refuse in the road as well, and picks it up and puts it in the turban. On this Guru gives his scholars a list of the things which they ought to pick up. Soon afterwards he falls into a hole, and they will not pull him out because he is not named in the list, and he has to write his name at the end before they will do it, just as in Jann Posset.

From a Latin poem in elegiac verse, of the second half of the 15th century, which is to be found in a Strasburg MS. (MSS. Johann, c. 105, 5 folios) under the title Asinarius. The story is as in Raparius (No. 146), broad, but not disagreeable. It begins thus,

and concludes,

For its contents compare the notes to Hans the Hedgehog (No. 108). The lying in wait to espy the mysterious enchantment ought properly to have been followed by some misfortune, or at all events by the interruption of earthly happiness, such as ensues after Psyche has cast the light upon Love, and in Melusina, the Swan Knight, and other stories. In Hans the Hedgehog we have a suggestion of misfortune in that he becomes black, and has to be cured; here we recognize it by the fact that the youth anxiously endeavours to fly: