hermits in succession. In the great Hindú collection, Kathá Sarit Ságara (Ocean of the Streams of Story), Saktideva, in quest of the Golden City, is dispatched by a hermit, who had lived eight hundred years and never heard of it, to an elder brother. The same also occurs in the tale of Hasan of Basra. In the Tamil romance, translated by Pandit Natésa Sastrí under the title of Dravidian Nights, a prince is directed by an ascetic who opened his eyes once every watch to another who opened his eyes every second watch, and he sends him to another who opened his eyes every third watch. Similar instances occur in the countless Eastern and Western forms of the Legend of the Oldest Animal, the probable original of which is found in the Mahábhárata, and reproduced by me in the Academy, October 27, 1888, and other versions are cited in my Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. ii, p. 90 ff; from which the foregoing few are taken.
Jack’s feeding the eagle with pieces of his own flesh occurs in many stories, and it seems to be essentially a Buddhistic idea. In Dozon’s Contes Albanais (No. XV) a young hero in quest of a sister bridles a huge falcon, and supplies him with flesh from his thigh when the provision he had taken with him is exhausted, and on arriving at their destination, when the bird discovers that he is bleeding it disgorges the pieces, and, replacing them in his thigh, the youth is at once healed. In the Persian Tútí Náma, or Parrot-Book, a prince saves a frog from a snake, and gives the snake, in place of the prey of which he had been deprived, a piece of flesh from his arm. The snake then assumes the form of a man, as does also the frog, and the prince by their aid obtains a post of honour at the court of a foreign king, and marries his daughter, of course. In the Persian romance, which purports to recount the adventures of Hátim Taï, the generous Arab chief, we read that, while the self-sacrificing hero was journeying through a desert, he discovered a wolf pursuing a doe. Hátim calls on the wolf to allow the doe to escape, and then gives the
