Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/308

 300 wicked invitation secret. When Anepon returned at even, she, being afraid, made herself to seem as a woman that had suffered violence, and told her husband exactly the reverse of what had happened. His wrath was thereby kindled against Satou and he went out to slay him, but Satou called on Phra to save him, and the god placed a river between the brothers, so that when day dawned Anepou might hear the truth. At sunrise Satou tells his story, and, mutilating himself, he says that he will leave Anepou and go to the valley of the cedar, in the cones of which he will deposit his heart, "so that if the tree be cut his heart would fall to the earth and he must die." He then tells Anepou how to find and revivify his heart after seven years, and departs. Anepou going home slays his wife and casts her to the dogs.

In the second part of the story Satou marries a woman given him by the gods, but her beauty causes the king to covet and possess her, and she tries to get rid of Satou in vain. The king cuts the cedar down and Satou dies, but Anepou finds his heart under a pod or cone and revivifies it. Satou then assumes the form of the Apis bull and gets the chance of speaking to his wife. She, terrified, has the bull slain, and from two drops of his blood spring two fine persea-trees on the great staircase of the palace. One day one of the trees addresses her, and she persuades the king to cut it down, when a chip of it flies down her throat and she becomes the mother of a child who is really Satou in a new form. "In due time the king flew up to heaven"; then Satou, as his successor, executes the queen and lives happily with Anepou.

What, let us now ask, is the philosophy of Punchkin? These folk-tales, however romantic,—however, in their details, the product of imagination that ran riot when feeling was dominant and the judgment scarce awakened, when the first impressions of phenomena were unchallenged by the intellect,—are not primary. 'Tis a far cry from the primitive man to the first story-teller. And at the back of the world's folk-tales lie the relics of barbaric notions concerning the nature of man and his relation to external things which first supplied the motif or raw material of the fiction. They are therefore the dramatic presentment of that early groping when man was, as his savage representatives extant are, in a state of "fog" concerning the nature and