r
command the admiration of nations addicted to active exercise.

The explanation of Nanaksa's thrice repeated laugh, also, could
retain its vitality only in an atmosphere pervaded by a belief in the
transmigration of souls. Buddhistic apologues have sometimes passed
into legends of Christian Saints. But it would be difficult to perform
the operation in the case of an account of how a woman, who had
tormented to death her husband's sister, was justly punished by the
reappearance in the world of the ill-used sister-in-law, in the form
of that unkind woman's exceedingly peevish baby daughter. Numerous,
also, as are European stories about ogres, vampires, and other
demoniacal cannibals, we shall not readily find a western counterpart
of the terrible tale, in No. 24, of the "Rakshas" which sometimes
appears as a goat, and sometimes as a most beautiful young girl,
dressed in grand clothes and rich jewels, but at midnight turns into a
devouring demon with a craving for human flesh.

Just as some of the themes of these stories do not seem to have
European counterparts, so portions of their machinery appear to be
without exact western equivalents. The stupendous transformations
which now and then take place (see pp. 5, 148, 244) can reconcile
themselves only to an oriental imagination. However much the
occidental mind may attempt to "make believe," it cannot credit such a
statement as that when the Bel-Princess died, her eyes turned into two
birds, her heart into "a great tank," and her body into "a splendid
palace and garden," her arms and legs becoming "the pillars that
supported the verandah roof," and her head "the dome on the top of the
palace." In almost all countries, when a fairy hero has been slain by
a demoniacal or otherwise villainous personage, he is recalled to life
by magic means. In European folk-lore the resuscitating remedy is
usually a Water of Life, or a Balsam, or some similar fluid. In these
Indian tales, it is blood streaming from the resuscitator's little
finger. Thus when Loving Laili (p. 83) found her husband dead and
headless, she put his head back on his shoulders, and smeared his neck
with the blood which flowed "like healing medicine," when "she cut
her little finger inside her hand straight down from the top of her
nail to her palm." A power of becoming at will invisible is everywhere
often attributed to heroes of romance. But it is generally connected
with "a cap of darkness," or some similar m