is certainly one of these.  Barbers also play an important part in many of these tales.  It is quite common for the Court barber to marry the King’s daughter, and to succeed him as ruler; but the barber was, of course, surgeon or blood-letter as well as the principal news-agent—­the forerunner of the daily newspaper of our times.  The transmutation of human beings into mules, and vice versa, is a common fable, and we meet with wolf-children and the curious superstition that unbaptised people can penetrate into the domains of the enchanted Moors, and that these have no power to injure them.  The story of the Black Slave, who eventually married the King’s daughter and had a white mule for his Prime Minister, is very Eastern in character.  “From so wise a King and so good a Queen the people derived great benefit; disputes never went beyond the ears of the Chief Minister, and, in the words of the immortal barber and poet of the city, ’the kingdom flourished under the guidance of a mule:  which proves that there are qualities in the irrational beings which even wisest ministers would do well to imitate.’” The Watchful Servant is, however, purely Spanish in character, and it closes with the proverb that “a jealous man on horseback is first cousin to a flash of lightning.” King Robin, the story of how the beasts and birds revenged themselves on Sigli and his father, the chief of a band of robbers, recalls “Uncle Remus” and his animal tales; for the monkeys, at the suggestion of the fox, and with the delighted consent of the birds and the bees, made a figure wholly of birdlime to represent a sleeping beggar, being quite certain that Sigli would kick it the moment that he saw the intruder from the windows of his father’s castle.  In effect both father and son became fast to the birdlime figure, when they were stung to death by ten thousand bees.  Then King Robin ordered the wolves to dig the grave, into which the monkeys rolled the man and the boy and the birdlime figure, and, after covering it up, all the beasts and birds and insects took possession of the robbers’ castle, and lived there under the beneficent rule of King Robin.

Silver Bells is, again, a story of a wholly different type, and charmingly pretty it is, with its new development of the wicked step-mother—­in this case a mother who had married again and hated her little girl by the first husband. Elvira, the Sainted Princess tells how the daughter of King Wamba, who had become a Christian unknown to her father, by her prayers and tears caused his staff to blossom in one night, after he had determined that unless this miracle were worked by the God of the Christians she and her lover should be burned.