life again, like the ox in the South African _Maerchen_[82].

In all these thoroughly popular and traditional tales, the supernatural
machinery varies much from that of Perrault, who found _Peau d'Ane_
'difficile a croire.' But, in all the wilder tales, the machinery is
exactly what we note in the myths and actual beliefs of the lower races.
_They_ do not shrink from the conception of a mother who becomes a cow
(like Io), nor of a cow (as in the case of Heitsi Eibib among the
Hottentots), who becomes the mother of human progeny. It is not unlikely
that the Scotch mother, in _Rashin Coatie_, who bequeathes to her
daughter a wonder-working calf (a cow in Sicily, Pitre, 41), is a
modification of an idea like that of the cannibal Servian variant[83].
Then the _Mouton_ of Madame d'Aulnoy seems like a courtly survival of
the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_ mixed with the _donnee_ of _Beauty and the
Beast_[84]. The notion of helpful animals makes all the 'Manitou'
element in Red Indian religion, and is common in Australia. The helpful
calf, or sheep, bequeathed by the dying mother, reminds one of the
equally helpful, but golden Ram, which aids Phrixus and Helle against
their stepmother, after the death or deposition of their mother Nephele.
This Ram also could speak,--

alla kai auden
andromeen proeeke kakon teras[85].

This recalls not only the Celtic _Sharp Grey Sheep_, but also Madame
d'Aulnoy and her princess, 'je vous avoue que je ne suis pas accoutumee
a vivre avec les moutons qui parlent.'

The older rural and popular forms of _Cinderella_, then, are full of
machinery not only supernatural, but supernatural in a wild way: women
become beasts, mothers are devoured by daughters (a thing that even Zulu
fancy boggles at), life of beast or man is a separable thing, capable of
continuing in lower forms. Thus we may conjecture that the ass's skin
worn by _Peau d'Ane_ was originally the hide of a beast helpful to her,
even connected, maybe, with her dead mother, and that the ass, like the
cow, the calf, the sheep, and the doves of _Maerchen_, befriended her,
and clothed her in wondrous raiment.

For all these antique marvels Perrault, or the comparatively civilised
tradition which Perrault followed, substituted, in _Peau d'Ane_, as in
_Cendrillon_, the Christian conception of a Fairy Godmother. This
substitute for more ancient and less _speciosa miracula_ is confined to
Perrault's tales, and occurs nowhere in purely tradit