only wished to find out what you had preconcerted for us.  I am the person who has been marked three nights.”  “It is well, young man.  But prove now your words:  How is there human blood in the wine?” “Call your butler and he will tell you.”  The butler came in trembling all over, and confessed that when he corked the wine he had cut his finger with the knife, and a drop of blood had fallen into the cask.  “But how is there woman’s milk in the bread?” asked the king.  “Call the bakeress,” he replied, “and she will tell it you.”  When they questioned her, she confessed that she was kneading the bread and at the same time suckling her baby, and that on pressing it to her breast some milk flowed and was mixed with the bread.  The sorceress, the mother of the king, when they came to the third revelation of the young man, confessed in her turn that the king was illegitimate.

Mr. Tawney refers to the Chevalier de Mailly’s version of the Three Princes of Serendip (Ceylon):  The three are sitting at table, and eating a leg of lamb, sent with some splendid wine from the table of the emperor Bahram.  The eldest maintains that the wine was made of grapes that grew in a cemetery; the second, that the lamb was brought up on dog’s milk; while the third asserts that the emperor had put to death the son of the wazir.  And that the latter is bent on vengeance.  All these statements turn out to be well-grounded.  Mr. Tawney also refers to parallel stories in the Breslau edition of The Nights; namely, in Night 458, it is similarly conjectured that the bread was baked by a sick woman; that the kid was suckled by a bitch, and that the sultan is illegitimate; and in Night 459, a gem-cutter guesses that a jewel has an internal flaw, a man skilled in the pedigrees of horses divines that a horse is the offspring of a female buffalo, and a man skilled in human pedigrees that the mother of the favourite queen was a rope-dancer.  Similar incidents occur in “The Sultan of Yemen and his Three Sons,” one of the Additional Tales translated by Scott, from the Wortley-Montague Ms., now in the Bodleian Library, and comprised in vol. vi. of his edition of “The Arabian Nights Entertainments,” published at London in 1811.

An analogous tale occurs in Mr. E. J. W. Gibb’s recently-published translation of the “History of the Forty Vezirs (the Lady’s Fourth Story, p. 69 ff.), the motif of which is that “all things return to their origin:” 

Turkishanalogue

There was in the palace of the world a king who was very desirous of seeing Khizr[FN#503] (peace on him!), and he would even say, “If there be any one who will show me Khizr, I will give him whatsoever he may wish.”  Now there was at that time a man poor of estate, and from the stress of his poverty he said to himself, “Let me go and speak to the king, that if he provide for me during three years, either I will be dead, or the king will be dead, or he will forgive me my fault, or I shall on somewise