our Henry I.

In any case Marie manifestly did render the fables, or some of the
fables, in _Le dit d'Ysopet_ out of English. The presence of English
words in her French seems to raise a strong presumption in favour of the
truth of the assertion. One of these English words occurs in her form of
_The Three Wishes_ (Fable xxiv), called _Dou Vilain qui prist un Folet_,
also _Des Troiz Oremens_, or _Du Vileins et de sa Fame_. A Vilein
captured a Folet (fairy or brownie?) who granted him Three Wishes. The
_Folet_ resembles the tree-bogle of the _Pantschatantra_. The vilein
gave two wishes to his wife. Long they lived without using the wishes.
One day, when they had a marrow bone for dinner, and found it difficult
to extract the marrow, the wife wished that her husband had--

'tel bec came li plereit
E cum li Huite cox aveit.'

The Huite cox is an English word, woodcock, in disguise. The husband, in
a rage, wished his wife a woodcock's beak also, and there they sat, each
with a very long bill, and two wishes wasted. There Marie leaves them--

'Deus Oremanz unt ja perduz
Que nus n'en est a bien venuz,'

'with two wishes lost, and no good gained thereby.' Manifestly the third
wish was expended in a restoration of human noses to each of them. The
moral is that ill befalls them--

'qui trop creient autrui parole.'

We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or other
shape of _Syntipas_. If it was, did the change come in the Latin
handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the
version worked on by Marie had a _popular_ origin, whether derived by
oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which had
filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit? There
seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no
mediaeval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale
in _Syntipas_ and its derivatives, though Marie would not have rhymed
that offensive _conte_ if she had met with it in the English collection.
Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of _The Three Wishes_
among backward and remote races, American or African. If such a version
were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might argue that the tale
was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as told in
_Pantschatantra_, to make it seem essentially and peculiarly Indian, and
incapable of having been invented elsewhere.

A fourteenth-century