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sorcerer rose up in terror and fled. When he thus lost his presence of mind, and dropped his spoon and ladle; the Vetála pursued him, and opening his mouth swallowed him whole.*[1]
When Śrídarśana saw that, he lifted up his sword and attacked the Vetála, but the Vetála said to him, " Śrídarśana, I am pleased with this courage of yours, so take these mustard-seeds produced in my mouth. If you place these on the head and hands of the king, the malady of consumption will immediately leave him, and you in a short time will become the king of the whole earth." When Śrídarśana heard this, he said, " How can I leave this place without that sorcerer. The king is sure to say that I killed him out of a selfish regard to my own interests." When Śrídarśana said this to the Vetála, he answered, " I will tell you a convincing proof, which will clear you. Cut open the body of this corpse, and shew inside it this sorcerer dead, whom I have swallowed." When the Vetála had said this, he gave him the mustard-seeds, and went off somewhere or other, leaving that corpse, and the corpse fell on the ground.
Then Śrídarśana went off, taking with him the mustard-seeds, and he spent that night in the asylum in which his friend was. And the next morning he went to the king, and told him what had happened in the night, and took and shewed to the ministers that sorcerer in the stomach of the corpse. Then he placed the mustard-seeds on the head and the hand of the king, and that made the king quite well, as all his sickness at once left him. Then the king was pleased, and, as he had no son, he adopted as his son Śrídarśana, who had saved his life. And he immediately anointed that hero crown-prince; for the seed of benefits, sown in good soil, produces abundant fruit. Then the fortunate Śrídarśana married there that Padmisțhá, who seemed like the goddess of Fortune that had come to him in reward for his former courting of her, and the hero remained there in the
- ↑ * Cp. the Vampire stories in Ralston's Russian Folk-Tales, especially that of the soldier and the Vampire, p. 314. It seems to me that these stories of Vetálas disprove the assertion of Herz quoted by Ralston, (p. 318) that among races which burn their dead, little is known of regular corpsespectres, and of Ralston, that vampirism has made those lands peculiarly its own which have been tenanted or greatly influenced by Slavonians. Vetálas seem to be as troublesome in China as in Russia, see Giles's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. II, p. 195. In Bernhard Schmidt's Griechische Märchen, p. 139, there is an interesting story of a Vampire, who begins by swallowing fowls, goats and sheep, and threatens to swallow men, but his career is promptly arrested by a man born on a Saturday. A great number of Vampire stories will be found in the notes to Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer, Book VIII, 10. See also his poem of Roprecht the Robber, Part III. For the lamps fed with human oil see Addendum to Fasciculus IV, and Brand's Popular Antiquities, Vol. I, p. 312, Waldau's Böhmische Märchen, p. 360, and Kuhn's Westfaliche Märchen, p. 146.
