all the world takes the side of the gazelle, and it is _mourned
with a public funeral_.

Here, then, in Zanzibar we have decidedly the most serious and
purposeful form of _Puss in Boots_. It is worth noting that the animal
hero is _not_ the Rabbit who is the usual hero in Zanzibar as he is in
Uncle Remus's tales. It is also worth noticing that a certain tribe of
Southern Arabians do, as a matter of fact, honour all dead gazelles with
seven days of public mourning. 'Ibn al-Moghawir,' says Prof.
Robertson-Smith, in _Kinship in Early Arabia_ (p. 195), 'speaks of a
South Arab tribe called Beni Harith or Acarib, among whom if a dead
gazelle was found, it was solemnly buried, and the whole tribe mourned
for it seven days.... The gazelle supplies a name to a clan of the Azd,
the Zabyan.' Prof. Robertson-Smith adds (p. 204), 'And so when we find a
whole clan mourning over a dead gazelle, we can hardly but conclude that
when this habit was first formed, they thought that they were of the
gazelle-stock' or Totem kindred.

It is quite possible that all these things are mere coincidences.
Certainly we shall not argue, because the most moral form of _Puss in
Boots_ gives us a gazelle in place of a cat, and because a certain Arab
clan mourns gazelles, while the gazelle hero is found in the story of a
half-Arab race, that, therefore, the Swahili gazelle story is the
original form of _Puss in Boots_, and that from Arabia the tale has been
carried into Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, India, and France, often
leaving its moral behind it, and always exchanging its gazelle for some
other beast-hero.

This kind of reasoning is only too common, when the object is to show
that India was the birthplace of any widely diffused popular fiction. In
India, people argue, this or that tale has a moral. Among Celts and
Kamschatkans it has _no_ moral. But certain stories did undeniably come
from India in literary works, like the stories of Sindibad. Therefore
this or that story also came from India, dropping its moral on the way.
Did we like this sort of syllogism, we might boldly assert that _Puss
in_ _Boots_ was originally a heroic myth of an Arab tribe with a gazelle
for Totem. But we like not this kind of syllogism. The purpose of this
study of _Puss in Boots_ is to show that, even when a tale has probably
been invented but once, in one place, and has thence spread over a great
part of the world, the difficulty of finding the original centre is
perh