Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/70

married, not a wizard king, nor even a giant, but an elephant. The woman hides her brothers, the elephant "smells something." In the night, the woman escapes, with all the elephant's herds except three kine, which she instructs to low as loud as if they were whole flocks. These beasts then act like the "talking spittle," in Gaelic and Zulu, and like the chattering dolls in the Russian tale. The woman bids a rock open, she and her brothers enter, and when the elephant comes the rock closes on him, like the "Rocks Wandering," or clashing rocks, in the Odyssey, and he is killed. In the Eskimo Tale (Rink, 7) two brothers visit a sister married to a cannibal, but she has become a cannibal too. A tale much more like the Hottentot story of the Nama woman is the Eskimo "Two Girls" (Rink 8). One of the girls married, not an elephant, but a whale. To visit her, her two brothers built a boat of magical speed. In their company the woman fled from the whale. But instead of leaving magical objects, or obediently lowing animals behind her, she merely tied the rope by which the whale usually fastened her round a stone. The whale discovered her absence, pursued her, and was detained by various articles which she threw at him. Finally she and her brothers escaped, and the whale was transformed into a piece of whale-bone. In the Samoyed story (Castren. 11) the pursuit of the cannibal is delayed by a comb which the girl throws behind her, and which becomes "a thick wood;" other objects tossed behind become rivers and mountains. The same kind of feats are performed during the flight, in a story from Madagascar (Folk-lore Record, Aug. 1883), a story which, in most minute and curious detail of plot, resembles the Scotch "Nicht, Nocht, Nothing," the Russian "Tsar Morskoi," and the Gaelic "Battle of the Birds." In Japan, as among the Samoyeds, the hero (when followed by the Loathly Lady of Hades) throws down his comb,