If our view be correct, then several rules of etiquette, and not one alone, will be illustrated in the stories which we suppose the rules to have suggested.  In the case of Urvasi and Pururavas, the rule was, not to see the husband naked.  In ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ the husband was not to be looked upon at all.  In the well-known myth of Melusine, the bride is not to be seen naked.  Melusine tells her lover that she will only abide with him dum ipsam nudam non viderit. {76a} The same taboo occurs in a Dutch Marchen. {76b}

We have now to examine a singular form of the myth, in which the strange bride is not a fairy, or spiritual being, but an animal.  In this class of story the husband is usually forbidden to perform some act which will recall to the bride the associations of her old animal existence.  The converse of the tale is the well-known legend of the Forsaken Merman.  The king of the sea permits his human wife to go to church.  The ancient sacred associations are revived, and the woman returns no more.

   She will not come though you call all day
   Come away, come away.

Now, in the tales of the animal bride, it is her associations with her former life among the beasts that are not to be revived, and when they are reawakened by the commission of some act which she has forbidden, or the neglect of some precaution which she has enjoined, she, like Urvasi, disappears.

* * * * *

The best known example of this variant of the tale is the story of Bheki, in Sanskrit.  Mr. Max Muller has interpreted the myth in accordance with his own method. {77} His difficulty is to account for the belief that a king might marry a frog.  Our ancestors, he remarks, ‘were not idiots,’ how then could they tell such a story?  We might reply that our ancestors, if we go far enough back, were savages, and that such stories are the staple of savage myth.  Mr. Muller, however, holds that an accidental corruption of language reduced Aryan fancy to the savage level.  He explains the corruption thus:  ’We find, in Sanskrit, that Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife.  She consented, on condition that he should never show her a drop of water.  One day, being tired, she asked the king for water; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bheki disappeared.’  This myth, Mr. Muller holds, ’began with a short saying, such as that “Bheki, the sun, will die at the sight of water,” as we should say that the sun will set, when it approaches the water from which it rose in the morning.’  But how did the sun come to be called Bheki, ‘the frog’?  Mr. Muller supposes that this name was given to the sun by some poet or fisherman.  He gives no evidence for the following statement:  ’It can be shown that “frog” was used as a name for the sun.  Now at sunrise and sunset, when the sun was squatting on the water, it was called the