499
Then there came from the Dekhan four heroes, who, having heard tidings of her, were eager to obtain her, and they were furnished with the qualities which she desired. They were announced by the warder and introduced, and then king Mahávaráha asked them in the presence of Anangarati; " What are your names? what is your descent, and what do you know?" When they heard this speech of the king's, one of them said— " I am Panchaphuttika by name, a Śúdra; I possess a peculiar talent; I weave every day five pairs of garments, one of them I give to a Bráhman, and the second I offer to Śiva, and the third I wear myself, and as for the fourth, if I had a wife, I would give it to her, and the fifth I sell, and live upon the proceeds." Then the second said, " I am a Vaiśya named Bháshájna; I know the language of all beasts and birds.*[1]
Then the third said, " I am a Kshatriya named Khadgadhara, and no one surpasses me in fighting with the sword." And the fourth said, " I am an excellent Bráhman named Jívadatta: by means of the sciences which I possess by the favour of Gaurí, I can raise to life a dead woman." †[2] When they had thus spoken, the Śúdra, the Vaiśya, and the Kshatriya one after another praised their own beauty, courage and might, but the Bráhman praised his might and valour, and said nothing about his beauty.
Then king Mahávaráha said to his door-keeper— " Take all these now and make them rest in your house." The door-keeper, when he heard the order, took them to his house. Then the king said to his daughter Anangarati, " My daughter, which of these four heroes do you prefer?" When
- ↑ * Cp. the properties of the magic ring given to Canace in the Squire's tale, and Grimm's story of " Die drei Sprachen," (No. 33, Kindermärchen) . See also Tylor's Primitive Culture, Vol. I, pp. 18, 423. In the Edda, Sigurd learns to understand the language of birds by tasting the blood of Fufner. For other parallels see Liebrecht's Dunlop, p. 184, and note 248.
- ↑ † Cp. the 77th chapter of this work, the second in the Vetála Panchavinśati, and Ralston's exhaustive note, in his Russian Folk-tales, pp. 231, 232, 233. Cp. also Bernhard Schmidt's Griechische Märchen, p. 114, and Bartsch's Sagen, Märchen, und Gebräu- cheaus Meklenburg, Vol. I, p. 486. The Pseudo-Callisthenes (Book II, c. 40) mentions a fountain that restored to life a salt fish, and made one of Alexander's daughters immortal. This is perhaps the passage that was in Dunlop's mind, when he said (page 129 of Liebrecht's translation) that such a fountain is described in the Greek romance of Ismenias and Ismene, for which Liebrecht takes him to task. See the parallels quoted by Dunlop and Liebrecht. Wheeler, in his Noted Names of Fiction, tells us that there was a tradition current among the natives of Puerto Rico, that such a fountain existed in the fabulous island of Bimini, said to belong to the Bahama group. This was an object of eager and long-continued quest to the celebrated Spanish navigator, Juan Ponce de Leon. By Ismenias and Ismene Dunlop probably means Hysminias and Hysmine. See also Birlinger, Aus Schwaben, p. 185.
