pread mythical incidents in
the world,--the reappearance of living people out of the monster that
has devoured them.

In literature, this incident first meets us in the myth of Cronus
(Hesiod, _Theog._ 497; Pausanias, x. 24), where Cronus disgorges his
swallowed children alive, after gulping up the stone in swaddling bands
which he had taken for Zeus, his youngest infant. He had previously
dined on a young foal that he was assured his wife had just borne, when,
in reality, the child was Poseidon. In this adventure Cronus united the
mistake of the ogress mother-in-law, in _La Belle au Bois Dormant_, who
ate the kid in place of the Sleeping Beauty's boy, the adventure of the
king who hears his wife has borne a beast-child, and the adventure of
the Wolf who disgorges his prey alive. The local fancy of Arne in
Arcadia had combined all these ideas of _Maerchen_ into one divine myth
(Pausan. viii. 8, 2). It would be superfluous to enumerate here all the
savage and civilised stories of beings first swallowed and then
disgorged alive. A fabulous monster Kwai Hemm is the swallower in
Bushman story. The Iqong qongqo takes the _role_ among the Kaffirs.
There are some five examples in Callaway's _Zulu Nursery Tales_. _Night_
is the swallower in Melanesia (Codrington, _Journal Anthrop. Inst._ Feb.
1881), while the Sun swallows the stars in a Piute myth. It is quite
possible that a savage theory of Night swallowing and restoring Light,
or of the Sun swallowing the stars, is the origin of the conception[44].
The Australians tell it in a shape not unlike Grimm's. The Eagle met the
Moon and offered him some Kangaroo meat. The Moon ate up the Kangaroo,
and then swallowed the Eagle. The wives of the Eagle met the Moon, who
asked them the way to a spring. As he stooped to drink, they cut him
open with a stone tomahawk, and extracted the Eagle, who came alive
again[45]. In Germany it was with a pair of scissors that the Wolf was
cut up, and he was then stuffed with stones (as in Grimm 5, _The Wolf
and the Seven Little Kids_). The stones kill him in _Little Red Cap_; in
the German tale, their weight drags him into the well, where he, like
the Australian Moon, wants to drink after his banquet. In Pomerania a
ghost takes the Wolf's _role_, the stones are felt to be rather 'heavy'
by the ghost, and the child escapes[46].

The whole story has been compared by M. Husson to the adventure of
Vartika, whom the Asvins rescue from the throat of a wol