ked woman knew that her very husband had been killed,
she died of a broken heart.

Notes.

A Pampango variant (c), which I have only in abstract, is entitled
"The Seven Hunchbacked Brothers." It was collected by Wenceslao Vitug
of Lubao, Pampanga. It runs thus:--

There were seven hunchbacked brothers that looked just alike. One of
them married, and maintained the other six in his house. The wife,
however, grew tired of them, and locked them up in the cellar,
where they starved to death. In order to save burial-expenses,
the woman fooled the grave-digger. When he had buried one man and
returned for his money, she had another body lying where the first
had lain, and told him that he could not have his money until the
man was buried to stay. Thus the poor gravedigger buried all six
corpses under the impression that he was working with the same one
over and over again. On his way back from burying the sixth, he met
the husband riding home on horseback. Thinking him to be the corpse,
which he exactly resembled, the grave-digger cried out, "Ah! so this
is the way you get ahead of me!" and he struck the living hunchback
with his hoe and killed him.

This Pampango variant, although it is a little more specific than
the Tagalog, is identical with our second version.

Our two stories and the variant represent a family of tales found
scattered all over Europe. They are also connected distantly with
one of the stories in the "1001 Nights," and thus with the Orient
again. For a discussion of this cycle, see Clouston, "Popular Tales and
Fictions," 2 : 332 ff., where are cited and abstracted versions from
the Old-English prose form of the "Seven Wise Masters," from the Gesta
Romanorum, also the fabliau "Destourmi;" then five other fabliaux from
Legrand's and Barbasan's collections, especially the trouvere Dutant's
"Les Trois Bossus;" and the second tale of the seventh sage in the
"Mishle Sandabar," the Hebrew version of the book of Sindibad. On
pp. 344-357 Clouston gives variants of the related story in which
the same corpse is disposed of many times. For further bibliography,
see Wilson's Dunlop, 2 : 42, note.

The nearest parallel I know of to our first story is Straparola, 5 :
3, from which it was probably derived.

There were three humpbacked brothers who looked very much alike. The
wife of one of them, disobeying the order of her husband, secretly
received her two brothers-in-law. When her husband returned
unexpect