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Rh withstand the Wind, as being inferior to Mice which can bore into its entrails. So the Brahmin goes with her to the Mouse-King. Her body became beautified by her hair standing on end for joy, and she said "Papa, make me into a Mouse, and give me to him as a wife." The Indian fable has exactly the same moral as the Greek one, Naturam expellas. We can trace the incident of strong, stronger, more strong still, and strongest, in the Talmud, while there is a foreign air about the metempsychosis in the Phædrine fable. As this fable is one of the earliest known in Greece before Alexander's march to India, it is an important piece of evidence for the transmission of fables from the East. (Cf. La Fontaine, ii. 18; ix. 7.)

Has become popular through La Fontaine's Perrette. Derived from India, as has been shown by Benfey in his Einleitung. Panchatantra, §209. Professor Max Müller has expanded this in his admirable essay on the Emigration of Fables, Selected Essays, i. pp. 500-576. The story of Alnaschar, the Barber's Fifth Brother in the Arabian Nights, also comes from the same source. La Fontaine's version, which has made the fable so familiar to us all, comes from Bonaventure des Periers, Contes et Nouvelles, who got it from the Dialogus Creaturarum of Nicholaus Pergamenus, who derived it from the Sermones of Jacques de Vitry (see Prof. Crane's edition, no. ii.), who probably derived it from the Directorium Humana Vitæ of John of Capua, a converted Jew, who translated it from the Hebrew version of the the Arabic Kalilah wa Dimnah, which was itself derived from the old Syriac version of a Pehlevi translation of the original Indian work.