CHAP. V.
common root In these versions the king is represented by a good- humoured squire who makes himself merry over the successful devices of the Master Thief, as he accomplishes the several tasks imposed upon him. These tasks taken separately are much the same in each, but the difference of order indicates that no one was regarded at the first as essentially more difficult than another. In none of them, however, does the humour of the story turn on the force of public opinion. The whole point lies in the utter inability of any one to guard against the thief, even when they know that they are going to be robbed and have themselves pointed out the object to be stolen. Here, as in the stories of Rhampsimtos and the Shifty Lad, the means for achieving one of the tasks is wine: but the thief has to take away not the dead body of a man, but a living horse, on which sits a groom, or, as in the Norse tale, twelve horses, each with a rider guarding them. The disguise assumed by the thief is the dress of a beggar-woman, and her wine, which in the German story is powerfully drugged, soon puts the guards to sleep as soundly as the soldiers of the Egyptian king. In this version the thief swings the rider, saddle and all, in the air by ropes tied to the rafters of the stable; in the Norse tale, the twelve grooms find themselves astride the beams in the morning. The theft of the sheet and ring from the persons of the squire and his wife is an incident not found in either the Egyptian or the Scottish stories; but the trick practised on the priest occurs again in the Hindu tale of the nautch-girl Champa Ranee, under a disguise which cannot hide the common source from which the stories have come down to us, while it leaves no room for the notion that the one version has been suggested by the other.
The Hellenic Master Thief.But in truth the supposition is in this case wholly uncalled for. The story of the Master Thief was told in Europe, probably ages before the Homeric poems were put together, certainly ages before Herodotos heard the story of the Egyptian treasure-house. In all the versions of the tale the thief is a young and slender youth, despised sometimes for his seeming weakness, never credited with his full craft and strength. No power can withhold him from doing aught on which he has set his mind: no human eye can trace the path by which he conveys away his booty. It is the story of the child Hermes, and even under the most uncouth disguise it has lost but little either of its truthfulness or its humour. Bolts and bars are no defence against him; yet the babe whom Phoibos can shake in his arms is the mighty marauder who has driven off all his oxen from Pieria, When his work is done, he looks not much like one who needs to be dreaded; and the soft whistling sound which closes his
