of his mother, who undertakes that no harm shall befall her during his absence.  The queen is delivered at one birth of seven lovely children, six boys and one girl, each of whom has a silver chain around its neck.[FN#426] The king’s mother plots with the midwife to do away with the babes and place seven little dogs in bed beside the poor queen.  She gives the children to one of her squires, charging him either to slay them or cast them into the river.  But when the squire enters the forest his heart relents and laying the infants wrapped in his mantle, on the ground, he returns and tells his mistress that he has done her behest.  When the king returns, the wicked Matabrun accuses his wife to him of having had unnatural commerce with a dog, and shows him the seven puppies.  The scene which follows presents a striking likeness to that in the Arabian story after the birth of the third child.  King Oriant is full of wrath, and at once assembles his counsellors, “dukes, earls knights and other lords of the realm, with the bishop and prelate of the church,” and having stated the case, the bishop pleads in favour of the queen, and finally induces him not to put her to death, but confine her in prison for the rest of her life.  Meanwhile the children are discovered by an aged hermit, who takes them to his dwelling, baptises them and brings them up.  After some years it happens that a yeoman in the service of the king’s mother, while hunting in the forest, perceives the seven children with silver chains round their necks seated under a tree.  He reports this to Matabrun, who forthwith sends him back to kill the children and bring her their silver chains.  He finds but six of them one being absent with the hermit, who was gone alms seeking; and, touched by their innocent looks, he merely takes off the silver chains, whereupon they become transformed into pretty white swans and fly away.  How the innocence of the queen is afterwards vindicated by her son Helyas—­he who escaped being changed into a swan—­and how his brethren and sister are restored to their proper forms would take too long to tell, and indeed the rest of the romance has no bearing on the Arabian tale.[FN#427]

In another mediaeval work, from which Chaucer derived his Man of Law’s Tale, the Life of Constance, by Nicholas Trivet, an English Dominican monk, the saintly heroine is married to a king, in whose absence at the wars his mother plots against her daughter-in- law.  When Constance gives birth to a son, the old queen causes letters to be written to the king, in which his wife is declared to be an evil spirit in the form of a woman and that she had borne, not a human child, but a hideous monster.  The king, in reply, commands Constance to be tended carefully until his return.  But the traitress contrives by means of letters forged in the king’s name to have Constance and her son sent to sea in a ship, where she meets with strange adventures.  Needless to say, the old queen’s wicked devices come to naught.