sound asleep, snoring like thunder, with the princess clasped to his breast.  The third youth steals her without waking the fiend.  Then the fourth takes off the Devil’s shoes and flings them to the end of the world, and off they all go with the princess.  The Devil wakes and goes after them, but first he must find his shoes—­though what need he could have for shoes it is not easy to say; but mayhap the Devil of the Albanians is minus horns, hoof and tail!  This gives the fifth hero time to erect his impregnable tower before the fiend returns from the end of the world.  When he comes to the tower he finds all his skill is naught, so he has recourse to artifice, which indeed has always been his forte.  He begs piteously to be allowed one last look of his beloved princess.  They can’t refuse him so slight a favour, and make a tiny hole in the tower wall, but, tiny as it is, the Devil is able to pull the princess through it and instantly mounts on high with her.  Now is the marksman’s opportunity:  he shoots at the fiend and down he comes, “like a hundred of bricks” (as we don’t say in the classics), at the same time letting go the princess, who is cleverly caught by the seventh hero, and is none the worse for her aerial journey.  The princess chooses the seventh for her husband, as he is the youngest and best looking, but her father the king rewards his companions handsomely and all are satisfied.

The charming history of Prince Ahmad and his fairy bride is “conspicuous from its absence” in all these versions, but it re-appears in the Italian collection of Nerucci:  “Novelle Popolari Montalesi,” No. xl., p. 335, with some variations from Galland’s story: 

A certain king had three daughters, and a neighbouring king had three sons, who were much devoted to the chase.  They arrived at the city of the first king, and all fell in love with his daughter[FN#416] and wanted to marry her.  Her father said it was impossible to content them all, but if one of them would ask her, and if he pleased her, he would not oppose the marriage.  They could not agree which it was to be, and her father proposed that they should all travel, and the one who at the end of six months brought the most beautiful and wonderful present should marry her.  They set out in different directions and at the end of six months they meet by appointment at a certain inn.  The eldest brings a magic carpet on which he is wafted whithersoever he will. (It goes a hundred miles in a day.) The second brings a telescope which shows whatever is happening a hundred miles away.  The youngest brings three stones of a grape, one of which put into the mouth of a person who is dying restores him to life.  They at once test the telescope by wishing to see the princess, and they find her dying—­at the last gasp indeed.  By means of the carpet they reach the palace m time to save her life with one of the grape-stones.  Each claims the victory.  Her father, almost at his wits’ end to decide the question, decrees