t move, because he had forgotten one thing--the
thing his youngest daughter had asked for." Sabr turns out to be a
fairy prince. It is a common incident in Indian tales for a hero or
heroine to demand a spouse, generally of a more or less supernatural
nature, whose name is known but nothing more. Just as the Fan Prince
was demanded, under the apparently meaningless name of Sabr, so is the
hand of the Princess Labam longed for by the Raja's son in No. 22,
although her existence was unknown to him till he heard a parrot
pronounce her name one day; and so is the acquisition of a
Bel-Princess resolved upon by the prince in No. 21, because his
sisters-in-law say to him, in a disagreeable manner, "We think that
you will marry a Bel-Princess." Muniya, the narrator of the story,
"says that telling the prince he would marry a Bel-Princess was
equivalent to saying he would not marry at all; for these brothers'
wives knew she lived in the fairy country, and that it would be very
difficult, if not impossible, for the prince to find her, and take her
from it." But this seems to be merely a rationalistic view of the
matter. Some mystery seems to underlie these suggestions of, or
desires for, unions with unfamiliar beings. They occur not
unfrequently in Russian tales. In one of Afanasief's skazkas (vol.
vii., No. 6) a baby prince cries, and refuses to go to sleep, till his
royal father rocks his cradle, crooning the while, "Sleep, beloved
one! When you grow up you shall marry Never-enough-to-be-gazed-at
Beauty, daughter of three mothers, sister of nine brothers." Having
slept vigorously, the baby awakes, asks for the king's blessing, and
sets out in search of the unknown Beauty in question. In another (vol.
i., No. 14), Prince Ivan, having married his three sisters to the
Wind, the Hail, and the Thunder, wanders forth in search of a bride.
Finding the remains of two slaughtered armies, and discovering that
their slaughterer was named Anastasia the Fair, he resolves, though
knowing nothing else about her, to make her his wife. Among the
numerous minor incidents which are common to eastern and western
folk-tales, may be mentioned the aid lent to heroes in difficulties by
Magic Instruments, as in No. 22, or by Grateful Beasts, as in No. 24.
A belief in magic is of course world-wide, but the particular
instruments referred to seem to have good reasons for claiming an
oriental extraction. The stories in which stress is laid upon the
gratit