we now bid you farewell."

"Why are you going away? What is there in me that you do not like? Pray
do not leave me until I have repaid you!" He then called each of the
six, and expressed his great gratitude to him, and begged him not
to go away. "I will even abdicate the throne if you want me to," Don
Juan said, "for your departure will kill me." The queen also begged
the six men not to leave.

At last Noet Noen said, "Don Juan, long have we lived together; yet
you know not whence we come, for we have never told you. We cannot be
absent from there much longer." The prophet then related minutely to
the king who they were, and why they had come to his aid. Then the
six men disappeared.

Notes.

The course of events common to these three stories is this: A king
proclaims that he will give the hand of his daughter to the one who
can furnish him with a very costly or marvellous conveyance. The poor
young hero, because of his kindness to a wretched old man or woman (or
corpse), is given the wonderful conveyance. On his way to the palace
to present his gift, he meets certain extraordinary men, whom he takes
along with him as companions. The king, realizing the low birth of the
hero, refuses the hand of his daughter until additional tasks have
been performed. With the help of his companions, the hero performs
these, and finally weds the princess. This group of stories was almost
certainly imported into the Philippines from Europe, where analogues
of it abound. I know of no significant Eastern variants. Parallels
to certain incidents can be found in Malayan and Filipino lore,
but the cycle as a whole is clearly not native to the Islands.

In a broad sense, our stories belong to the "Bride Wager" formula
(see Von Hahn, 1 : 54, Nos. 23 and 24). The requirement that a
suitor shall guess correctly the kind of skin from which a certain
drum-head is made (usually a louse-skin) is to be found in Italian
(Basile, 1 : 5; cf. Gonzenbach, No. 22; Schneller, No. 31), Spanish
(Caballero, trans, by J. H. Ingram, "The Hunchback"), German (Grimm,
2 : 467, "The Louse," where the princess makes a dress, not a drum,
from the skin of the miraculous insect). Only Basile's story combines
the louse-skin motif with the wonderful companions,--a combination
found in our "King Palmarin." There seems to be no close connection,
however, between these two tales. Although Oriental Maerchen turning
on this motif of the louse-skin drum are lacking, the