101.—Bearskin (Greencoat).
From the neighbourhood of Paderborn. This is an independent variation of the foregoing. The Devil appears here in the saga which is related by Hebel (Alleman. Gedichte, 50), as a green-coat (child of the world), and whosoever gives himself to him has only to put his hand in his pocket and he will find money.
From Zwehrn. This is a beautiful story which belongs to the group of Reinhart Fuchs. The willow-wren, the sparrow, and the tom-tit, all express an idea. It is the cunning of the small creatures triumphing over the large ones, and thus the entire animal creation under the leadership of the fox, has to yield to the birds, just as in the story of The Sparrow and the Dog (No. 58), the waggoner has to yield to the bird. The willow-wren is the ruler, for the saga accepts the least as king as readily as the greatest. Again, this is the opposition of the crafty dwarfs to the stupid giants; indeed dwarf-like little men often received the nickname of "little hedge-sparrow." In Touti Nameh (Fable 8, in Iken, No. 32), the powerful animals are punished in a similar manner by the small ones. An elephant throws the eggs out of a sparrow's nest, by violently rubbing himself against the tree in which it is built. The bird combines with another bird called long-beak, and with a frog and a bee, to seek revenge. The bee gets into the elephant's ear and torments him by humming, until he is quite frantic. Then long-beak comes and puts out his eyes with his sharp beak. Some days afterwards, when the blind elephant is standing tortured by thirst on the edge of a precipice, the frog begins to croak, and the elephant thinks he is near a pond and plunges over. The War of the Wasps and the Ass, in Barachja Nikdani (Wolf's Zeitschrift, 1. 1), is allied to this, and so is the negro story, in Kölle, of the Cock and the Elephant (No. 7). Old Sultan, No. 48, and the War between the Beasts of the Earth and the Birds of the Air, in the story from Transylvania; (see Haltrich, No. 43), should be compared.
From Hesse. This is the primeval fable of the pitcher which never ran dry, and which only those who were perfectly innocent had the power of using. Compare the Indian story of the pan in which it was only necessary to place a single grain of rice, and it would cook food incessantly (Polier, 2. 45). Then there is the saga of the Zauberlehrling (from Lucian's φιλοψευδὴς) in Goethe's
