l
drink the water"). In the remaining versions the prophecy is more
vague, that the parents shall be the son's servants. In the
_Pentamerone_ there is a story in which a father has five simple sons
whom he sends into the world to learn experience. The younger returns
with a knowledge of the language of birds. But the rest of the story
is not of our type.

_Remarks._--In his second paper (_Arch. Rev._ i., 161 _seq._) Sir
James Frazer has many interesting remarks upon the folk conception of
the means of acquiring a knowledge of the language of animals. This is
generally done by a gift of magic rings, or by eating magic plants
(mainly fern) or eating serpents (generally white). Sir James Frazer
connects the rings with serpents by suggesting that serpents are
supposed to have stones in their head which confer magic powers (_As
You Like It_, iv., 2.) He further connects the notion of eating
serpents with acquiring the language of birds by referring to the
views of Democritus that serpents are generated from the mixed blood
of diverse birds and are therefore in a strict sense blood relations
of them; this idea, he suggests, may have arisen from the fact that
serpents eat birds' eggs. It would be an easy transition in
folk-thought to consider that serpents would understand the language
of the birds they ate and that persons eating serpents would
understand the language of both. So Sigurd understands the language of
birds, after eating the blood of Fafnir the Worm. But all this throws
little light upon the story itself.

Bolte gives, i., 323-4, many folk-tales in which the hero becomes not
a pope but a king and compares the story of Joseph in the Bible as
possibly a source of the Prophetic Dream of the father and mother
waiting upon the son. The transference to the pope may have been
influenced by the tradition given by Vincent of Beauvais (_Spec.
Hist._, xxiv., 98) that Sylvester II. learned at Seville the language
of birds. There was also the tradition that at the election of
Innocent III., 1198, three doves flew about the cathedral, one of
which, a white one, at last settled down upon his shoulder. Raumer,
_Gesch. d. Hohenstaufen_, ii., 595.

IX. THE THREE SOLDIERS

This tale is widely spread through Europe, being found from Ireland to
Greece, from Esthonia to Catalonia. It is generally told of three
soldiers, or often brothers, but more frequently casual comrades. In
Kohler's notes on Imbriani, p. 356-7, he points o