Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/99

Rh have been carried to the south by the bold Norsemen than have travelled from the south to the north. As a matter of course, our familiar Norwegian friend, the Lad who went to the North Wind, reappears in Italy with his Ass, that lays money, his Table-cloth, that furnishes all kinds of dainties, and his Stick, that thrashed the rascally innkeeper who stole those precious treasures.

The third chapter treats of Stories of Oriental Origin, which at once suggest the question of their transmission from their cradle-land. Venetian commerce with the Levant may account, in part at least, for the introduction of Asiatic fictions into Italy. But this is a subject too wide to be discussed in what must necessarily be a mere notice of a work which would require a whole number of the Folk-Lore Journal to do it justice. We can only glance at a few of the more notable stories. The fable of the ungrateful snake, that would have killed the man who saved its life (p. 150), which first appeared in Europe in the Disciplina Clericalis of Alfonsus, twelfth century, is also found, with little variation, in Steel and Temple's Wide-Awake Stories, from the Panjáb and Kashmír. Another story in Alfonsus, of the herdsman and his flock of sheep crossing the ferry, of which Mr. Crane gives several variants (pp. 155-6), has its analogue in the Canarese story-book entitled Kathá Manjari. The tale "Vineyard I was, Vineyard I am " (p. 159), known among story-comparers by the short title of "The Lion's Track," is not only found, as Mr. Crane remarks, in the Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic versions of the Seven Wise Masters (Book of Sindibád), but also occurs in the Syriac and old Castilian texts; and the last half of it still remains in the beautifully illuminated but unfortunately imperfect MS. Persian poem, Sindibád Náma, preserved in the India Office Library. In the story of "The Mason and his Son" (p. 163) we have a Sicilian variant of the Robbery of the King's Treasury, in the Seven Sages, the tradition of King Rhampsinitus in Herodotus, which does not appear to have been derived from Bandello's version, but presents some curious points of resemblance to the latter part of No. 24 of M. Legrand's Contes populaires Grecs (Paris, 1881). A Sinhalese version of this wide-spread story has been recently published in The Orientalist, vol. i. pp. 59-61. In stating that the story, in the Seven Sages, of