e
German novelist, reproduced the same tale in his _Volksm[:a]rchen_ (1795),
called in German _Der Gestiefelte Kater_. The cat is marvellously
accomplished, and by ready wit or ingenious tricks secures a fortune and
royal wife for his master, a penniless young miller, who passes under
the name of the marquis de Car'abas. In the Italian tale, puss is called
"Constantine's cat."

=Pwyll's Bag= (_Prince_), a bag that it was impossible to fill.

Come thou in by thyself, clad in ragged garments, and holding a bag
in thy hand, and ask nothing but a bagful of food, and I will cause
that if all the meat and liquor that are in these seven cantreves
were put into it, it would be no fuller than before.--_The
Mabinogion_ (Pwyll[TN-112] Prince of Dyved," twelfth century).

=Pygma'lion=, a sculptor of Cyprus. He resolved never to marry, but became
enamored of his own ivory statue, which Venus endowed with life, and the
sculptor married. Morris has a poem on the subject in his _Earthly
Paradise_ ("August"), and Gilbert a comedy.

Fell in loue with these,
As did Pygmalion with his carv[`e]d tree.

Lord Brooke, _Treatie on Human Learning_ (1554-1628).

[Asterism] Lord Brooke calls the statue "a carved tree." There is a
vegetable ivory, no doubt, one of the palm species, and there is the
_ebon tree_, the wood of which is black as jet. The former could not be
known to Pygmalion, but the latter might, as Virgil speaks of it in his
_Georgics_, ii. 117, "India nigrum fert ebenum." Probably Lord Brooke
blundered from the resemblance between _ebor_ ("ivory") and _ebon_, in
Latin "ebenum."

=Pygmy=, a dwarf. The pygmies were a nation of dwarfs always at war with
the cranes of Scythia. They were not above a foot high, and lived
somewhere at the "end of the earth"--either in Thrace, Ethiopia, India,
or the Upper Nile. The pygmy women were mothers at the age of three, and
old women at eight. Their houses were built of egg-shells. They cut down
a blade of wheat with an axe and hatchet, as we fell huge forest trees.

One day, they resolved to attack Hercul[^e]s in his sleep, and went to
work as in a siege. An army attacked each hand, and the archers attacked
the feet. Hercul[^e]s awoke, and with the paw of his lion-skin
overwhelmed the whole host, and carried them captive to King Eurystheus.

Swift has availed himself of this Grecian fable in his _Gulliver's
Travels_ ("Lilliput," 1726).

=