of the offspring; and on reaching home hands him all his keys, bidding him open whatever he liked. The hero enters the room containing the molten gold, and conceals his discoloured finger beneath a rag. He afterwards opens a series of six rooms and finds the bones of various animals, and, lastly, skulls of men. In the seventh chamber is a living horse, by whose advice he precipitates the demon into a cauldron of hot ghee. The horse swallows the contents of the treasure-chamber, and the hero flees upon his back, while the demon is eaten by his own companions out of the cauldron. The remainder of the narrative is tame; though, of course, it ends with the hero's marriage to a sultan's daughter.
The commencement of the last two variants is completely parallel with that of The Teacher and his Scholar, and recalls that of The King of the Fishes,[1] a Breton tale belonging to the Perseus group. In tales of this type a large fish caught by a fisherman and given to his childless wife, or to a childless queen, results in the birth of three boys, three colts, and three puppies. The eldest boy growing up, sallies forth into the world, kills a dragon, and marries a princess. The next day he goes, in direct defiance of his bride's prohibition, to a magician's house, or to hunt in a certain wood, where he is captured and spellbound. The second son sets out to seek his brother, and is received by the princess as her husband,—so like is he to the first. He shares his brother's fate, from which they are both at last rescued by the greater cunning of the youngest. Some of these stories hold out a hand of such apparent kinship to the Forbidden Chamber myth that it requires some care to avoid linking them together. But closer analysis shows their affinities to belong rather to a different class; and the mention of them here will serve to illustrate further the ease with which one folktale seems to glide off into another, just as in the physical world every genus of animals or plants fades through its several species (and they, in their turn, through their individual members) into the genera that on every side surround it. The hero's miraculous birth is not, however, an inseparable feature of the type we are considering. In the Roumanian
- ↑ Sébillot, Contes Populaires, vol. i. Story No, 18, p. 124.
