Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/346

 338 would be his son's servant, is angry with the pert youth. He gets a chest, puts his son therein, and pitches it into the sea. After three days the waif comes to land, and is taken to the king of that country as containing a treasure. Here, as in the last-mentioned tale, we probably have a reference to a well-known royal right. The king opens the chest, and adopts the boy, whom he finds alive within. At the age of twenty, the boy goes on a journey with a great company of people; but not with any design, so far as appears, of finding his parents, as in the typical story. The parents have now fallen into poverty, and keep an inn, where the hero goes to stay: and there the prediction is accomplished.

The learned Köhler, in a note to the tales of Pope Innocent and Christie, cited under the following type, refers, among others, to two variants which appear to belong to this genus. In the first, of Masurian origin, the prophet is a lark, and foretells that the boy will become very rich—his parents, on the other hand, very poor—and that his mother will wash his feet, and his father drink the water of his bath. The hero becomes the son-in-law of the king of England, whose son and daughter he cures. Visiting his native town some time afterwards, the lark's prediction is accomplished. In the next story a raven intimates a similar degradation on the father's part, which is fulfilled when his son has become an emperor's son-in-law, and the father claiming shelter as a beggar has been received at his palace for the night. Here there is no attempt by the father on his son's life: he is simply driven away.

V.

It would perhaps be unwise to assert that this, the last type we shall consider, is more generally known in Western Europe, and a greater favourite with the people, than those which precede it, but there can be no doubt of its extensive popularity, especially in France and Italy. The typical story is one found by M. Fleury in Lower Normandy, and entitled The Language of Beasts. It is to the