Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/230

 222 behind, one by one, by the hero, and the fugitives escape. The hero brings the heroine back to human shape; and, having plighted troth, they part. He goes to lodge with an old woman, and makes money by transforming himself successively into various objects, which she sells, always retaining something pertaining to these objects, otherwise he will be unable to resume his proper form. Finally he changes into a pomegranate, which his father plucks, but the demon by a trick nearly succeeds in getting possession of it; it falls in pieces, and the seeds are scattered. The demon as rapidly changes into a hen and chickens; whereupon the hero becomes a fox which kills the hen and chickens, but loses his eyes, for the hen has eaten two of the seeds. He returns to his own shape, and sets out to find the heroine, who is a king's daughter. Her father has built a hospital in gratitude for her deliverance. There the hero meets her, and she recognises him by a ring she had put on his finger when they plighted their troth. She leads him to bathe in a certain brook and his sight is restored.

This story calls to mind that of the Second Royal Mendicant in the Arabian Nights in which a similar combat takes place between an 'Efreet and a king's daughter learned in magic for the restoration of the Mendicant to human form from that of an ape. The beginning of the tale as it stands is of course totally different from that of the foregoing, but there are not wanting indications that it has obtained its present literary shape by the grafting of the story of the Ape-man on some variant of The Teacher and his Scholar. The 'Efreet and the King's Daughter are no strangers to one another; their greeting refers to some incident or chain of incidents outside the history of the Mendicant, and certainly not incompatible with the type we are now considering, though not included in any variant I am acquainted with. It is not impossible that further research among eastern folk-tales may recover the version which has been thus wrought up, or one near akin to it.

Meantime, the variant bearing the strongest likeness to the typical story is that of Mohammed the Prudent given by Spitta Bey in his