he length to which some mythologists
will go, may be mentioned M. Andre Lefevre's discovery that Poufle, the
dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in search of the
Dawn.

[Footnote 40: Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, p. 33.]

[Footnote 41: _Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye_, p. 157.]

LE PETIT CHAPERON ROUGE[42].

_Little Red Riding Hood._

Perrault has not concealed the moral which he thought obvious in this
brief narrative. There are wolves--

'_Qui suivent les jeunes Demoiselles
Jusques dans les maisons, jusques dans les Ruelles!_'

Racine, in an early letter, admits that he himself has been one of these
wolves.

'Il faut etre regulier avec les Reguliers, comme j'ai ete
loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos comperes.[43]'

But the nurses from whom Perrault or his little boy heard _Le petit
Chaperon Rouge_ had probably no such moral ideas as these. They _may_
have hinted at the undesirable practice of loitering when one is sent on
an errand, but the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence.
As it stands, the tale is merely meant to waken a child's terror and
pity, and probably the narrator ends it by making a pounce, in the
character of Wolf, _c'est pour te manger_, at the little listener. This
was the correct 'business' in our old Scotch nurseries, when we were
told _The Cattie sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning_.

'By cam' a cattie and ate it a' up my loesome,
Loesome Lady!
And sae will I you--worrie, worrie, gnash, gnash,
Said she, said she!'

'The old nurse's imitation of the _gnash_, _gnash_, which she played off
upon the youngest urchin lying in her lap, was electric' (Chambers,
_Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, 1842, p. 54).

If _Little Red Riding Hood_ ended, in all variants, where it ends in
Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the _machinery_ of
the story is derived from 'the times when beasts spoke,' or were
believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known that in the
German form, _Little Red Cap_ (Grimm 26), the tale by no means ends with
the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her grandmother are
resuscitated, 'the wolf it was that died.' This may either have been the
original end, omitted by Perrault because it was too wildly impossible
for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or children may have
insisted on having the story 'turn out well.' In either case the German
_Maerchen_ preserves one of the most widely s