by telling her that it was only a lump of flesh that she had given birth to, and it had been thrown into the river.  At the same time they informed her husband that Padma had eaten up her two new-born sons.  The King enraged at her inhuman conduct, ordered her to instant execution.  But there was a shrewd man in the court who privately saved her life.  A divinity appeared to the King in a dream, and revealed the whole truth to him.  The King made a strict investigation in the harem, and found that Padmavati had been perfectly innocent.  He became disconsolate, and gave vent to loud lamentations.  Soon after some fishermen appeared at court and presented the King with two infants, who betrayed their royal lineage by the resemblance which their features bore to those of the King.  They were reported to have been found in a vessel floating on the river.  The courtier who saved Padma’s life now wished to produce her before the King, but she refused to return and proceeded to her father’s hermitage.  After the death of her father she travelled through various places in the habit of a devotee; and in the course of her peregrinations she stopped at Banares, from whence Brahmadatta conducted her to his capital with great honour.

I am of opinion that this Buddhist tale is the original form of the “Envious Sisters”—­ that it ended with the restoration of the children and the vindication of the innocence of their mother.  The second part of our story has no necessary connection with the first, the elements of which it is composed being found in scores—­nay, hundreds—­of popular fictions in every country:  the quest of wonderful or magical objects; one brother setting out, and by neglecting to follow the advice tendered him by some person he meets on his way, he comes to grief; a second brother follows, with the same result; and it is reserved for the youngest, and the least esteemed, to successfully accomplish the adventure.  In the second part of the “Envious Sisters,” the girl, the youngest of the three children, plays the part of the usual hero of folk-tales of this class.  There is, generally, a seemingly wretched old man—­a hideous, misshapen dwarf—­or an ugly, decrepit old woman—­who is treated with rudeness by the two elder adventurers, so they do not speed in their enterprise; but the youngest addresses the person in respectful terms—­shares his only loaf with him—­and is rewarded by counsel which enables him to bring his adventure to a successful end.  In the “Envious Sisters,” which I cannot but think Galland has garbled from his original, the eldest clips the beard of the hermit, and presumably the second does the same, since we are told he found the hermit in the like condition (albeit, his beard had been trimmed but a few days before).  Each of them receives the same instructions.  In a true folk-tale the two elder brothers would treat the old man with contempt and suffer accordingly, while the youngest would cut his nails and his beard, and make