t received his
pay. So he bore the corpse of Juan to the seashore. He got a banca
[89] and dug a very deep grave beneath the water. Then he said to
the corpse, "If you can come out of this place, you are the wisest
person in the world." He then returned to Marta's house.

On his way back he happened to look behind him, when he saw, to his
great surprise, the humpback following him, carrying some fish. The
gambler gazed at him; and when he saw that he resembled exactly the
corpse that he had just buried, he said, "So you have come out of the
grave again, have you, you naughty humpback!" And with these words
he killed the humpback that very instant. This humpback was Marta's
husband returning home from the fishery.

Thus Marta tried to deceive, but she was the one who was deceived.

The Seven Humpbacks.

Narrated by Teofilo Reyes, a Tagalog from Manila.

Once there lived seven brothers who were all humpbacks, and who looked
very much alike. Ugly as these humpbacks were, still there was a lady
who fell in love with one of them and married him. This lady, however,
though she loved her husband well, was a very stingy woman. Finally
the time came when the unmarried humpbacks had to depend on the other
one for food. Naturally this arrangement was very displeasing to the
wife; and in time her hate grew so intense, that she planned to kill
all her brothers-in-law.

One day, when her husband was away on business, she murdered the six
brothers. Next she hired a man to come and bury a corpse. She told him
of only one corpse, because she wanted to deceive the man. When he had
buried one of the bodies, he came back to get paid for his work. The
woman, however, before he had time to speak, began to reproach him
for not burying the man in the right place. "See here!" she said,
showing him the corpse of the second brother, "you did not do your
work well. Go and bury the body again. Remember that I will not pay
you until you have buried the man so that he stays under the earth."

The man took the second corpse and buried it; but when he returned,
there it was again. And so on: he repeated the operation until he
thought that he had buried the same corpse six times. But after the
sixth, the last humpback, had been buried, the married humpback came
home from his work. When the grave-digger saw this other humpback,
he immediately seized and killed him, thinking he was the same man
he had buried so many times before.

When the wic