r obscurer features, or at least to offer such
parallels to them as are useful contributions to our stock of
materials for a systematic classification. Among the strange
characters who figure in European folk tales, there are few more
puzzling than the fair maidens who are at times discovered inside
fruits, and who must be provided with water to drink the moment they
emerge into the light, or else they will die. They seem properly to
belong to the south and east of Europe, to such countries, for
instance, as Greece, Sicily, and Wallachia. When they are found
elsewhere, as in the Norse tale of "The Three Lemons," the very name
of which speaks of the sunny south, they seem out of keeping with
their surroundings. In these Indian stories, the enclosure of a
heroine in a fruit is an incident which does not appear to be more
than usually amazing. The need of immediate water drinking is not
referred to. But the hero is warned (p. 81) that he must not open the
fruit in public, because the enclosed maiden will be quite destitute
of clothes. In another story which is widely spread over Europe--but
which we know best in the form of the tale of "The Blue Bird," founded
upon the theme of "The Lay of Ywonec," by Marie de France--the
murderous means by which the bird-lover is all but done to death by
jealous hands, which set sharp knives in the narrow opening through
which he has to fly, or beset his path with some other instruments of
ill, find their counterpart in the powdered glass employed to injure
the hero of the "The Fan Prince" (No. 25). His wife's six sisters, who
"were angry at their youngest sister being married, while they who
were older were not married," insist upon making his bed, and cover
the spot on which he is to lie with the powder into which they have
ground a glass bottle. Whereupon the prince becomes very ill, from the
glass powder going into his flesh.

The ordinary opening of many familiar folk-tales, including the
"Beauty and the Beast" story, finds a parallel in the same Indian tale
(p. 195). In all of them a man, when starting on a journey, promises
his youngest daughter that he will bring her back some object. This he
forgets to obtain. On his homeward journey, his ship refuses to move
until he has acquired the object in question. The Indian parent
promised to bring home Sabr to his daughter, having no idea what Sabr
meant. Not having obtained it, he set out on his homeward journey.
"But the boat would no