in their quest of the singing nightingale:  he must hide himself till he sees the bird go into its cage and fall asleep, then shut the cage and carry it off.  But he does not wait long enough, and tries to shut the cage while the bird’s feet are still outside, so the bird takes up sand with its feet and throws it on him, and he descends to the seventh earth.  The second brother, finding the chaplet shrunk, goes off in his turn, leaving his ring with the youngest brother—­if it contract on the finger it will betoken his death.  He meets with the same fate as his elder brother, and now the youngest, finding the ring contract, sets out, leaving with his mother a rose, which will fade if he dies.  He waits till the singing nightingale is asleep, and then shuts him in the cage.  The bird in alarm implores to be set at liberty, but the youth demands first the restoration of his brothers, and the bird tells him to scatter on the ground some sand from beneath the cage, which he does, when only a crowd of negroes and Turks (?  Tatars) appear, and confess their failure to capture the singing nightingale.  Then the bird bids him scatter white sand, which being done, 500 whites and the two lost brothers appear and the three return home with the bird, which sings so charmingly in the palace that all the people come to listen to it outside.—­The rest of this story tells of the amours of the girl and a black, who, at her instigation, kills her eldest brother, but he is resuscitated by the Water of Life.

Through the Moors, perhaps, the story found its way among the wandering tribes (the Kabail) of Northern Africa, who have curiously distorted its chief features, though not beyond recognition, as will be seen from the following abstract of their version, from M. Riviere’s collection of “Comes Populaires de la Kabylie du Djurdjura” (Paris, 1882): 

KABA’IL version.

A man has two wives, one of whom is childless, the other bears in succession seven sons and a daughter.  The childless wife cuts off the little finger of each and takes them one by one into the forest, where they are brought up.  An old woman comes one day and tells the daughter that if her brothers love her they will give her a bat.  The girl cries to her brothers for a bat, and one of them consults an aged man, who sends him to the sea shore.  He puts down his gun under a tree, and a bat from above cries out, “What wild beast is this ?” The youth replies, “You just go to sleep, old fellow.”  The bat comes down, touches the gun and it becomes a piece of wood; touches the youth and he becomes microscopic.  This in turn happens to all the brothers, after which the girl goes to the sea-shore, and when she is under the tree the bat calls out, “What wild beast is this?” But she does not answer she waits till the bat is asleep, then climbs the tree, and catching the “bird” (sic), asks it where her brothers are, and on her promising to clothe the bat in silver and gold, the creature touches the guns and the brothers,