the bottle. When he picked it up, the imp begged to be released,
and told him of all he had suffered; but the soldier made a number of
conditions,--his release from the army, a four-dollar daily pension,
etc.,--and finally the imp promised to enter the body of the daughter
of the King of Naples. The soldier was to present himself at court
as a physician, and demand any reward he wished to, in return for
a cure. So done. The king accepted the services of the soldier, but
stipulated that if in three days he had not cured the princess, he
should be hanged. The soldier accepted the conditions; but the demon,
seeing that he had his arrogant enemy's life in his hands, and bent on
revenge, refused to leave the body of the princess. On the last day,
however, the soldier ordered all the bells rung. On the demon's asking
what all the noise was about, the soldier said, "I have ordered your
mother-in-law summoned, and she has just arrived." In great terror
the Devil at once quitted the princess, and the soldier was left
"in victorious possession of the field."

It will be noticed that the last episode is almost identical with the
ending of our story "The Devil and the Guachinango," while there is
a considerable amount of divergence between the two elsewhere.

For versions collected before 1860 I am indebted to Benfey's treatment
of this cycle. It is found in his "Pantschatantra," 1 : 519 ff. I take
the liberty of summarizing it in this place, first, because it is the
only exhaustive handling of the story I know of; and, second, because
Benfey's brilliant work, while constantly referred to and quoted,
has long been out of print, and has never been accessible in English.

The occasion for Benfey's dissertation on this particular tale is
the relationship he sees between it and the large family of stories
turning on the motive of a marvellous cure, a representative of which
is "Pantschatantra," 5 : 12, "The Miraculous Cure of a Blind Man,
a Humpback, and a Three-breasted Princess." [79] While the story we
are discussing cannot be considered in any sense an offshoot of the
Pantschatantra tale, it can scarcely be denied, says Benfey, that
between the two there is a definite internal relationship, which
is further manifested by the fact that in its later development the
latter is actually joined to the former (p. 519).

The earliest form of our story is found in the "Cukasaptati," where it
is told as the story for the 45th and 46th n