The Provenience of certaiti Negro Folk- Tales. 4 1 3
second time he ties his ox and returns for the shoes to take the pair to his unamiable wife. To steal from the man his second ox the youth hangs himself to a tree thrice in succession. 1 To determine whether or not it is witchcraft or actually three suicides the man ties up the ox and goes back to look for the other two hanging figures. To steal the third ox, the youth lures the man away by bellowing like an ox.
In the Scotch tale, Shifty Lad drops his own shoe in the way of the herd who was bringing a wether for a wed- ding. Subsequently, by ba-aing like the wether Shifty Lad purloins a kid, and after that, by bleating like a kid, a stot.2
Plainly the tale is European ^ and a Portuguese variant must be inferred to be the origin of the Cape Verde Islands tale. That the tale was carried to the Southern States and to the Bahamas by Negroes from the African West Coast where it had been learned from Portuguese I have little or no doubt.* The only variants I have found besides those already noted may well have been borrowed also from the Portuguese. The following Amazonian Indian tale is close to the Carolinian variant and to one of the Bahama variants.
' Cp. Cosquin, ii. 276. Before this incident I had studying mistakenly con- cluded that the " playing dead " variant in the negro tales was a derivation of the "shoe" variant. It is plainly a variant of the man who hangs himself or who stands on his head (Cosquin, ii. 273, 276).
"Campbell, i. 235-7.
^ The source of the European Master Thief cycle I need not inquire into, but I note that in the Master Thief tale of Bengal the incident of the shoe in the road is given. Two gold-lace covered shoes are dropped in the road by the elder thief. The younger thief picks up the second and ties his cow to return for the first (Lai Behari Day, /v//C'-7a/£'j^^«;j,rt/, pp. 158-9. London, 1912).
- That the tale spread from the French in Louisiana is a tenable hypothesis,
although, as far as I know, no French variant of the shoe pattern has been recorded. It is not only tenable, but improbable, that the third Andros Island variant was learned from Scotch sources in the Bahamas.
