nd Galicia, are told in the evening, and have
rarely found their way into print, have the strong stamp of the
legitimate Eastern fable, and bear a great family resemblance to those
of the _Arabian Nights_. As, in fact, the _Thousand and One Nights_ was
very early published in Spanish, it is probable that its marvellous
histories were known verbally to the people of the Iberian continent for
many centuries, and have coloured much of its folklore. _The Ingenious
Student_ is certainly one of these. Barbers also play an important part
in many of these tales. It is quite common for the Court barber to marry
the King's daughter, and to succeed him as ruler; but the barber was,
of course, surgeon or blood-letter as well as the principal
news-agent--the forerunner of the daily newspaper of our times. The
transmutation of human beings into mules, and _vice versa_, is a common
fable, and we meet with wolf-children and the curious superstition that
unbaptised people can penetrate into the domains of the enchanted Moors,
and that these have no power to injure them. The story of the Black
Slave, who eventually married the King's daughter and had a white mule
for his Prime Minister, is very Eastern in character. "From so wise a
King and so good a Queen the people derived great benefit; disputes
never went beyond the ears of the Chief Minister, and, in the words of
the immortal barber and poet of the city, 'the kingdom flourished under
the guidance of a mule: which proves that there are qualities in the
irrational beings which even wisest ministers would do well to
imitate.'" _The Watchful Servant_ is, however, purely Spanish in
character, and it closes with the proverb that "a jealous man on
horseback is first cousin to a flash of lightning." _King Robin_, the
story of how the beasts and birds revenged themselves on Sigli and his
father, the chief of a band of robbers, recalls "Uncle Remus" and his
animal tales; for the monkeys, at the suggestion of the fox, and with
the delighted consent of the birds and the bees, made a figure wholly of
birdlime to represent a sleeping beggar, being quite certain that Sigli
would kick it the moment that he saw the intruder from the windows of
his father's castle. In effect both father and son became fast to the
birdlime figure, when they were stung to death by ten thousand bees.
Then King Robin ordered the wolves to dig the grave, into which the
monkeys rolled the man and the boy and the birdlime fig