People catching fish with their hands receive a net and give fish.
People eating porridge with no relish receive a fish and give millet.
Guinea-fowls eating white ants receive millet and give feathers.
People wearing maize-leaves receive feathers and give a goat.
At this point the resemblance between the two stories ends. The trick by which, in Dr. Elmslie's, the man exchanges his goat for a cow and then for forty cattle, has no place in the other version. Indeed, I should not be surprised to find that it was really part of a distinct story grafted on to the "House that Jack built" sequence, which, I cannot help fancying, embodies some tradition of the introduction of various improvements in the arts of life, e.g. fishing-nets, the substitution of the hoe for the digging-stick, &c. The nchokoti (or mchokoto, according to Dr. Hetherwick, who explains it as "a bamboo used for digging in the ground,"—the word appears to be both Nyanja and Yao), would seem to be still known, if not occasionally used, but the hoe or pick (kasu) is universal all over Central Africa, and in some parts forms a kind of currency. Certainly I can discover nothing like "over reaching" in this tale, though Mbuya's version, as I have it, leaves it uncertain what the frogs said or did, after beautifying themselves with red ochre. Of the words as they stand I can make nothing; but I imagine the drift of it is, that when asked to return the ochre, they answered that as it was all wet (wa madsi) they could not do so, and the Rabbit then, probably perceiving that (on the principle of "Ye canna get the breeks aff a Hielan' man") he would gain nothing by standing on his rights, took his departure. It is possible that there are many other steps in the series, but it is curious that the number of them in the two stories is identical, though the articles vary—the only one that is the same in both being the millet, which comes in at the same point in the tale, and is in each case given to guinea-fowl.
I have not succeeded in obtaining an exact analogue to this tale. The Rev. Duff Macdonald writes: "I do not remember any sustained narrative exactly the same as Dr. Elmslie's. The improvement referred to, however, strikes me as entering into many stories, so far as exemplified in one or two points; but I never heard such a full one as you indicate."
A. Werner.
