and the poor man offered to show his brother the place.  The rich brother miscounted the dragons as they left the castle, and the one left to watch killed and quartered him.  Two days afterwards his brother went to look for him, brought home the severed body, and got a tailor to sew the quarters together.  Next day the dragons called on the tailor to make them coats and shoes (sic), and heard of his sewing together the body.  He showed them the house, and forty-eight dragons got into chests, which the forty-ninth deposited with the poor man.  The children, playing about he chests, heard the dragons say, “Would that it were night, that we might eat them all!” So the father took forty-eight spits and made them red hot, and thrust them into the chests, and then said that a trick had been played upon him, and sent his servant to throw them one by one into the sea.  As often as the servant returned he pretended to him that he did not throw the chest far enough and it had come back and thus he disposed of the whole number.  In the morning when the last dragon came, the poor man told him one chest was found open:  he was seized with fear, pushed in and spitted like the others and the poor man became the possessor of the dragons’ castle.

There can be no doubt, I think, that this story owes nothing to Galland, but that it is a popular Greek version of the original Asiatic tale, of which Galland’s “Ali Baba” is probably a fair reflection.  The device of pretending to the servant that the dragon he had thrown into the sea was returned has its exact analogue in the humorous fabliau of “Les Trois Bossus,” where a rustic is made to believe that each of the hunchbacks had come back again, with the addition that, on returning from the river the third time, he seizes the lady’s hunchbacked husband and effectually disposes of him.

The Tale of Prince Ahmad.

Though my paper on this tale is of considerable length, it would perhaps have been deemed intolerably long had I cited all the versions of the first part—­ the quest of the most wonderful thing—­which are current in Europe, for it is found everywhere, though with few variations of importance.  There are two, however, of which I may furnish the outlines in this place.

In the “Pentamerone” of Basile,[FN#444], a man sends his five sons into the world to learn something.  The eldest becomes a master-thief; the second has learned the trade of shipwright; the third has become a skilful archer; the fourth has found an herb which brings the dead to life, and the youngest has learned the speech of birds.  Soon after they have returned home, they set out with their father to liberate a princess who had been stolen by a wild man, and by the exercise of their several arts succeed in their adventure.  While they quarrel as to which of them had by his efforts done most to deserve the princess for wife, the king gives her to the father, as the stock of all those branches.