Page:Tales of the Sun.djvu/311

 form:—A man left a tame bear in charge of his house, and of his sleeping child, while he was absent from home. On his return he missed his child, the house was in disorder, as if some great struggle had taken place, and the floor was covered with blood. Hastily concluding that the beer had killed and devoured the child, the enraged father slew the animal with his spear, but almost immediately afterwards found the carcase of a tiger, which the faithful bear had defeated and killed, and the child emerged unharmed from the jungle, where it had taken refuge.

In a black-letter English edition of the “Seven Wise Masters,” the knight, having slain his hound and discovered his child safe in its cradle, exclaims (and here the hand of the misogynist monkish writer is very evident!)—“Woe be to me, that, for the words of my wife, I have slain my good and best greyhound, the which had saved my child’s life, and hath slain the serpent; therefore I will put myself to penance.” And so he brake his sword in three pieces, and travelled in the direction of the Holy Land, and abode there all the days of his life. The preceding story of the Hunter and his Dog, it will be observed, is closely allied to that of the Brahman’s Wife and the Mongoose; and in conclusion, where the hunter erects a stately tomb over his dog’s remains, it presents a striking resemblance to the Welsh legend of Llewellyn and the dog Gellert, which is probably not merely fortuitous.

A very curious version is found in a black-letter chapter-book, entitled the “Seven Wise Mistresses,” written in imitation of the “Seven Wise Masters,” by one Thomas Howard, about the end of the seventeenth century, in which a knight and his lady are wrecked and cast ashore on a desert island, and the knight soon afterwards dies. His wife takes a thorn out of a lion’s foot (Androcles in petticoats), and the grateful animal follows her about, and provides her with food, and this is how the story goes on:—

“At last she began mourning to herself, deploring her condition in living in such obscurity in a foreign Country, and as her daily companion, a savage Beast, her mind yearning after her own habitation, she thus complained: