Page:Katha sarit sagara, vol2.djvu/118

 The consequence was that the wright was caught in the pitch. Thereupon the shifty lad cut off his head, which ho carried homo and buried in tho garden. When the king's people came into the store-house, they found a body, without a head and they could not make out whoso it was. By tho advice of tho Seanagal tho king had the trunk carried about from town to town by tho soldiers on tho points of spears. They wore directed to observe if any one cried out on seeing it. When they were going past tho house of tho wright, tho wright's wife made a tortured scream, and swift the shifty lad cut himself with an adze, and he kept saying to the wright's wife, " It is not as bad as thou thinkest." He then tells the soldier that she is afraid of blood, and therefore the soldier supposed that he was the wright and she his wife. The king had tho body hung up in an open place, and set soldiers to watch if any should attempt to take it away, or show pity or grief for it. The shifty lad drives a horse past with a keg of whisky on each side, and pretends to be hiding it from the soldiers. They pursue him, capture the whisky, got dead drunk, and the shifty lad carries off and buries tho wright's body. Tho king now lots loose a pig to dig up the body. The soldiers follow the pig, but the wright's widow entertains them. Meanwhile the shifty lad kills tho pig and buries it. The soldiers are then ordered to live at free quarters among the people, and wherever they got pig's flesh, unless the people could explain how they came by it, to make a report to the king. But tho shifty lad kills the soldiers who visit the widow, and persuades the people to kill all the others in their sleep. The Seanagal next advises the king to give a feast to all the people. Whoever dared to dance with the king's daughter would be the culprit. The shifty lad asks her to dance, she makes a black mark on him, but he puts a similar black mark on twenty others. The king now proclaims that, if tho author of these clever tricks will reveal himself, he shall marry his daughter. All the men with marks on them contend for the honour. It is agreed that to whomsoever a child shall give an apple, the king is to give his daughter. The shifty lad goes into the room where they are all assembled, with a shaving and a drone, and the child gives him tho apple. He marries the princess, but is killed by accident. Köhler (Orient und Occident, Vol. II, p. 303 and ff.) compares the story of Dolopathos quoted in Loiseleur II, 123, ed. Brunet, p. 183, a story of the Florontine Ser Giovanni, (Pecorone, IX, 1,) an old Netherland story in Haupt's Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum 5, 385— 404, called " The thief of Bruges," and a Tyrolese story in Zingerle, Kinder und Hausmarchen aus Süd-Deutschland, p. 300; also a French Romance of chivalry entitled, " The knight Berinus and his son Aigres of the Magnet mountain." There is also a story in the Seven Wise Masters (Ellis, specimens of early English metrical romances new ed. by Halliwell, London, 1848, p. 423) of a father and his son breaking into the treasure-house of the emperor Octavianus. Köhler also compares the story of Trophonius and his brother or father Agamedes (Scholiast to Aristophanes, Nubes, 508; Pausanias, IX, 37, 3.) This story will also be found in Simrock's Deutsche Volksbücher, Vol. XII, p. 148.}}

Add to note on p. 87— A similar idea is found in the Hermotimus of Lucian, chapters 80 and 81. A philosopher is indignant with his pupil on account of his fees being eleven days in arrear. The uncle of the young man, who is standing by," being a rude and uncultured person, says to the philosopher " My good man, pray let us hear no more complaints about the great injustice with which you conceive yourself to have been treated, for all it amounts to is, that we have bought words from you, and have up to the present time paid you in the same coin."