[FN#423] “Say, will a courser of the Sun
       All gently with a dray-horse run?”

[FN#424] Ting:  assembly of notables—­of udallers, &c.  The term survives in our word hustings; and in Ding-wall—­Ting-val; where tings were held.

[FN#425] The last of the old Dublin ballad-singers, who assumed the respectable name of Zozimus, and is said to have been the author of the ditties wherewith he charmed his street auditors, was wont to chant the legend of the Finding of Moses in a version which has at least the merit of originality: 

          “In Egypt’s land, upon the banks of Nile,
          King Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in style;
          She took her dip, then went unto the land,
          And, to dry her royal pelt, she ran along the strand.

          A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
          A smiling baby in a wad of straw;
          She took it up, and said, in accents mild—­
          Tare an’ agurs, girls! which av yez owns this child?”

The Babylonian analogue, as translated by the Rev. Prof.  A. H. Sayce, in the first vol. of the “Folk-Lore Journal” (1883), is as follows: 

“Sargon, the mighty monarch, the King of Agane, am I. My mother was a princess; my father I knew not, my father’s brother loved the mountain-land.  In the city of Azipiranu, which on the bank of the Euphrates lies, my mother, the princess, conceived me, in an inaccessible spot she brought me forth.  She placed me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen the door of my ark she closed.  She launched me on the river, which drowned me not.  The river bore me along, to Akki, the irrigator, it brought me.  Akki, the irrigator, in the tenderness of his heart, lifted me up.  Akki, the irrigator, as his own child brought me up.  Akki, the irrigator, as his gardener appointed me, and in my gardenership the goddess Istar loved me.  For 45 years the kingdom I have ruled, and the black headed (Accadian) race have governed.”

[FN#426] This strange notion may have been derived from some Eastern source, since it occurs in Indian fictions; for example, in Dr. Rajendralala Mitra’s “Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal,” p. 304, we read that “there lived in the village of Vasava a rich householder who had born unto him a son with a jewelled ring in his ear.”  And in the “Mahabharata” we are told of a king who had a son from whose body issued nothing but gold—­ the prototype of the gold-laying goose.

[FN#427] Connected with this romance is the tale of “The Six Swans,” in Grimm’s collection—­ see Mrs. Hunt’s English translation, vol. i. p. 192.

[FN#428] Mahbub. a piece of gold, value about 10 francs, replaces the dinar of old tales.  Those in Egypt are all since the time of the Turks:  9, 7, or 6 1/2 frs. according to issue.—­Note by Spitta Bey.