Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/339

 Rh to test their wisdom and talents, called them all to him, and asked them singly by whose good fortune it was that he possessed so large and powerful a kingdom, and was enabled to govern it so wisely and well. Three of them, of course, reply, "It is by your own good fortune, king, our father, that you have this kingdom and this power." But the youngest, with amazing impudence, claims for himself—not for Heaven or for destiny, still less for his sire —the greatness and power of the king. His father orders him away from his presence; and the boy, needing no second bidding, hastens to quit the palace. Nor, though the king afterwards relents and recalls him, can his messengers succeed in inducing him to return. His wife—for, though young, he is already married—follows him, to share his fate. He is now started on a strange career. He undergoes three shipwrecks; marries three more wives; vanquishes envious brothers-in-law, who claim from him the honour of killing a jackal, a bear, and a leopard; slays an ogre of the Punchkin breed; and, finally, contracts leprosy from the sting of an insect. Meantime, his wives have all met in a garden, which the coming of each in turn has made to bloom anew. As they will not utter a word, the king, who owns the garden, proclaims great rewards for him who will succeed in obtaining speech from them. The hero recovers his own health as well as the use of their tongues in the process. He marries, as his fifth wife—these Eastern heroes are lavish of their matrimonial engagements—the king's only daughter; and, having learnt that his father's kingdom has been conquered by strangers and his father and all the royal family taken prisoners, he gathers an army, and goes forth to make war on the victors. He succeeds in overthrowing his enemies, and restoring his father to the throne, wringing thus from the aged monarch an acknowledgment of the justice of his claim to the good fortune by which his parent held his realm and power.

This story is undoubtedly a needless jumble of adventures, but it may serve as an illustration, not merely of the ease with which our subject admits episodes, but, further, of the greatly wider field for doing and suffering opened when the expelled child is a son. Of this it is not necessary to cite any more examples; I shall therefore only allude to one or two other variants because of their intrinsic interest.