had a golden mouse made, which he
sent to the rich merchant from whom he had gotten his start, and that
merchant bestowed the hand of his daughter on the once poor youth.

The comic atmosphere, it will be seen, is altogether absent from this
Buddhistic parable.

A slight resemblance to our story may be traced in Bompas, No. XLIX,
"The Foolish Sons," where the clever youngest (of six brothers)
manages to acquire ten rupees, starting with one anna. He proceeds
by "borrowing," and paying interest in advance. The trick used here
is the same as that practised on the foolish wife in "Wise Folks"
(Grimm, No. 104), where a sharper buys three cows, and leaves one with
the seller as a pledge for the price of the three (see Bolte-Polivka,
2 : 440 f.).

Much closer parallels than the preceding, to the incidents of out
story, are to be found in a cycle of tales discussed by Bolte-Polivka
(2 : 201-202) in connection with "Hans in Luck" (Grimm, No. 83). It
will be recalled that in the Grimm story the foolish Hans exchanges
successively gold for horse, horse for cow, cow for pig, pig for
goose, goose for grindstone, which he is finally glad to get rid of by
throwing it into the water. "A counterpart of this story," say Bolte
and Polivka, "is the Maerchen of the 'profitable exchange,' in which
a poor man acquires from another a hen because it has eaten up a pea
or millet-seed that belonged to him; for the hen he gets a pig which
has killed it; for the pig, a cow; for the cow, a horse. But when he
finally levies his claim for damages upon a girl, and places her in
a sack, his luck changes: strangers liberate the maiden without the
knowledge of her captor, and put in her place a big dog, which falls
upon him when he opens the sack." It is to be noted that the cycle
as here outlined consists really of two parts,--the "biter biting"
and the "biter bit." Cosquin (2 : 209) believes that the last two
episodes--the maiden gained by chicanery, and the substitution of an
animal for her in the sack--form a separate theme not originally a part
of the cumulative motive; and, to prove his belief, he cites a number
of Oriental tales containing the former, but lacking the cumulative
motive (ibid., 209-212). Cosquin seems to be correct in this; although,
on the other hand, he is able to cite only one story (Riviere, p. 95)
in which there is not some trace of the "biter-bit" idea. Moreover,
even in the animal stories belonging to this group,--and h