is a butcher’s son; therefore did he draw to his origin.  Thy second vezir is a cook’s son, and he likewise proposed a punishment as became his origin.  Thy third vezir is a baker’s son; he likewise proposed a punishment as became his origin.  But thy fourth vezir is of gentle birth; compassion therefore becomes his origin, so he had compassion on that hapless one, and sought to do good and counselled liberation.  O king, all things return to their origin."[FN#505] And he gave the king much counsel, and at last said, “Lo, I am Khizr,” and vanished.[FN#506]

The discovery of the king’s illegitimate birth, which occurs in so many versions, has its parallels in the story of the Nephew of Hippocrates in the “Seven Wise Masters,” and the Lady’s 2nd Story in Mr. Gibb’s translation of the “Forty Vezirs.”  The extraordinary sensitiveness of the third young Brahman, in the Vetala story, whose side was scratched by a hair that was under the seventh of the mattresses on which he lay, Rohde (says Tawney), in his “Greichische Novellistik,” p. 62, compares with a story told by Aelian of the Sybarite Smindyrides, who slept on a bed of rose-leaves and got up in the morning covered with blisters.  He also quotes from the Chronicle of Tabari a story of a princess who was made to bleed by a rose-leaf lying in her bed.[FN#507]

The eleventh recital of the Vetala is about a king’s three sensitive wives:  As one of the queens was playfully pulling the hair of the king, a blue lotus leaped from her ear and fell on her lap; immediately a would was produced on the front of her thigh by the blow, and the delicate princess exclaimed, “Oh! oh!” and fainted.  At night, the second retired with the king to an apartment on the roof of the palace exposed to the rays of the moon, which fell on the body of the queen, who was sleeping by the king’s side, where it was exposed by her garment blowing aside; immediately she woke up, exclaiming, “Alas!  I am burnt,” and rose up from the bed rubbing her limbs.  The king woke up in a state of alarm, crying out, “What is the meaning of this?” then he got up and saw that blisters had been produced on the queen’s body.  In the meanwhile the king’s third wife heard of it and left her palace to come to him.  And when she got into the open air, she heard distinctly, as the night was still, the sound of a pestle pounding in a distant house.  The moment the gazelle-eyed one heard it, she said, “Alas!  I am killed,” and she sat down on the path, shaking her hands in an agony of pain.  Then the girl turned back, and was conducted by her attendants to her own chamber, where she fell on her bed and groaned.  And when her weeping attendants examined her, they saw that her hands were covered with bruises, and looked like lotuses upon which black beetles had settled.