he same
model, differing but slightly from each other. But the embodiment of
the wayfarer's destiny is quite differently represented in the two
stories. The Servian pilgrim first discovers his fortune, or rather
misfortune, in the person of a hag, who tells him she has been given
to him as his luck by Fate. Then he seeks out Fate, who appears in
human form. But in the Indian tale, "the fates are stones, some
standing, and others lying on the ground." One of the prostrate
stones, the traveller felt sure, must belong to him. "This must be
mine," he said; "it is lying on the ground, that's why I am so poor."
Whereupon he took to beating it, and continued to do so all day. When
night came, "God sent a soul into the poor man's fate, and it became a
man," who satisfied the wanderer's own wishes, and also answered the
questions which he had been requested to ask. Then "God withdrew the
soul, and the fate became a stone again, which stood up on the
ground."

There are two stories which enjoy a world-wide popularity in peasant
circles, but which have not been made familiar by modern literature to
cultured children. One of them may for the sake of convenience be
known by the name of the Substituted Bride, and the other by that of
the Calumniated Wife. The first relates the sorrows of a maiden who is
compelled to see an impostor seated in the place which she was
intended to fill, by the side of the princely husband whom she was
meant to wed. The second describes the sufferings long undergone by a
faithful wife and tender mother, who is falsely accused of some crime
by an envious rival, and is hastily punished by her angry lord. In
both of them the supernatural usually plays a part, but their main
interests are always human, and it is easier to sympathize with their
heroines than with most of the similar characters of popular fiction.
Yet those ill-used but patient princesses are but little known to the
thousands of story-readers who are familiar with the adventures of
Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and the
wives of Bluebeard and of the Beast. They have at various times
entered into literature, but not into that section of it which has
supplied our nursery fiction. They figure in most of the now so
numerous collections of folk-tales, but they have not been introduced
into society by the novelists or playwrights who have made their
sister-sufferers undying favourites. They are essentially moral tales,