274
When the Vetála, seated on the shoulder of the king, had told him
this wonderful tale, h again asked him a question in the following words, " King, remember the curse I previously denounced, and tell me which was the most fastidious of these three, who were respectively fastidious about eating, the fair sex, and beds ?" When the wise king heard this, he gave the Vetála the following answer, " I consider the man who was fastidious about beds, in whose case imposition was out of the question, the most fastidious of the three, for the mark produced by the hair was seen conspicuously manifest on his body, whereas the other two may have previously acquired their information from some one else" When the king said this, the Vetála left his shoulder, as before, and the king again went in quest of him, as before, without being at all depressed.
Note.
The above story resembles No. 2, in the Cento Novelle Antiche, and one in the Addition to the Arabian tales published by Mr. Scott. (Dunlop's History of Fiction, Vol. I, p. 415; Liebrecht's translation, p. 212 and note 282.) See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 203. In the Cento Novelle Antiche a prisoner informs the king of Greece, that a horse has been suckled by a she-ass, that a jewel contains a Worm, and that the king himself is the son of a baker.
The incident of the mattress reminds one of the test applied by the queen to her son's wife in " The Palace that stood on Golden Pillars," (Thorpe's Yuletide Stories, p. 64). In order to find out whether her daughter-in-law is of high birth, she puts first a bean, then peas, under her pillow. The prince's wife, who is really the daughter of a peasant, is apprised of the stratagem by her cat, which resembles Whittington's. Rohde in his Griechische Novellistik, p. 62, compares a story told by Aelian about the Sybarite Smindyrides, who slept on a bed of rose-leaves and got up in the morning covered with blisters. He also quotes from the Chronicle of Tabari a story of a princess who was made to bleed by a rose-leaf lying in her bed. Oosterley refers us to Babington's Vetála Cadai, p. 33, and the Chevalier de Mailly's version of the three Princes of Serendip. The three are sitting at table, and eating a leg of lamb, sent with some splendid wine from the table of the Emperor Behram. The eldest maintains that the wine was made of grapes that grew in a cemetery, the second that the lamb was brought up on dog's milk, the third says that the emperor had put to death the vazir's son, and the latter was bent on vengeance. All three statements turn out to be well-grounded. There are parallel stories in the 1001 Nights (Breslau). In Night 458 it is similarly conjectured that the bread was baked by a sick woman, that the kid was suckled by a bitch, and that the Sultan is illegitimate. In Night 459 a gem-cutter guesses that a jewel has an internal flaw, a man skilled in the pedigrees of horses divines that a horse is the offspring of a female buffalo, and a man skilled in human pedigrees that the mother of the favourite queen was a rope-dancer. Cp. also the decisions of Hamlet in saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in Simrock's Quellen des Shakespeare, 1, 81—85; 5,170; he lays down that some bread tastes of blood, (the corn was grown on a battle-field), that some liquor tastes of iron, (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well, in which some rusty swords had lain,) that some bacon tastes of corpses, (the pig had eaten a corpse), lastly that the king is a servant
