e other hand the sacrifice of the children for the faithful
servant has its closest parallel in the old French romance of Amis and
Amilun, where Amis smears Amilun with the blood of his child to cure
him of leprosy. The analogy is so close as almost to force the
assumption of derivation. Koehler accordingly in his _Aufsaetze_,
1894, pp. 24-35, regards the tale as a development of the Indian story
influenced by the romance of Amis.

XXII. JOHNNIE AND GRIZZLE

I have followed Bolte's formula s. v. Hansel and Gretel, 15, i., 115,
though with some misgivings. Very few of his variants have his section
F, which he divides into three variants: F 1. Ducks or angels carry
the children over the stream. F 2. Or they throw out obstacles to
pursuit. F 3. Or the witch drinks up the stream and bursts. F 2 is
obviously "contaminated" by the similar incident in the Master Maid,
and the existence of such alternatives indicates, to my mind, an
absence of a consistent tradition as to the ending of the story, which
obviously ended with the baking of the witch in the oven. I have
combined, in my ending F 1 and F 2, the former from the Grimms'
"Hansel and Gretel"; I have also adapted their title, with a
reminiscence of Sir James Barrie.

The predicament of the farmer must have often really occurred in the
Middle Ages when famine was the rule rather than the exception; and
the decision to "expose" the children recalls the general practice in
ancient Greece and Rome and in Arabia. A touch of comedy, however, is
given to this grim beginning of our tale by the house made of cookies
and sweetmeats, probably derived from the myth of a Schlarafenland of
the Germans and similar imaginations of the Celts (see _More Celtic
Fairy Tales_).

The beginning of the tale occurs early in Basile, v., 8, "Nennillo and
Nennila," in which the three kings' children find their way home twice
by similar devices, but at the third time scatter peas, which the
birds eat up. Perrault has the same beginning in his "Petit Poucet,"
which has been Englished as "Hop o' my Thumb," who shares some of the
adventures of Tom Thumb, as well as of the valiant Tailor. Lang has an
interesting but, as usual, inconclusive discussion of the incidents of
our tale in his Perrault civ.-cxi., and finds many of the incidents
among the Kaffirs, Zulus, and other savage tribes, but scarcely the
whole set of incidents from A to F, and that is what we want to find
in studying the story. Dr.