see—­ what you’ll see.”  So Peter lies down and gazes up at the sky very intently, looking for the man going straight to heaven on a black horse.  Meanwhile the traveller escapes, with the cart-load of clothes and the box of shining dollars, and the second horse besides.  Peter, when he reaches home, tells his wife that he had given the man from paradise the other horse for her second husband to ride about on, for he was ashamed to confess that he had been cheated as well as herself.[7] As to our traveller, having found three goodies as great fools as his own, he returned home, and saw that all his fields had been ploughed and sown; so he asked his wife where she had got the seed from.  “Oh,” says she, “I have always heard that what a man sows he shall also reap, so I sowed the salt that our friends the north-countrymen laid up with us, and if we only have rain, I fancy it will come up nicely."[8] “Silly you are,” said her husband, “and silly you will be as long as you live.  But that is all one now, for the rest are not a bit wiser than you;—­there is not a pin to choose between you!"[9]

Now, if it be “a far cry” from Italy to Norway, it is still farther from Norway to India; and yet it is in the southern provinces of our great Asiatic empire that a story is current among the people, which, strange as it may seem, is almost the exact counterpart of the Norse version of the pretended pilgrim from paradise, of which the above is an abstract.  It is found in Pandit S.M.  Natesa Sastri’s Folk-lore in Southern India, now in course of publication at Bombay; a work which, when completed, will be of very great value, to students of comparative folk-tales, as well as prove an entertaining story-book for general readers.  After condensation in some parts, this story—­which the Pandit entitles “The Good Wife and the Bad Husband”—­runs thus: 

In a secluded village there lived a rich man, who was very miserly, and his wife, who was very kind-hearted and charitable, but a stupid little woman that believed everything she heard.  And there lived in the same village a clever rogue, who had for some time watched for an opportunity for getting something from this simple woman during her husband’s absence.  So one day, when he had seen the old miser ride out to inspect his lands, this rogue of the first water came to the house, and fell down at the threshold as if overcome by fatigue.  The woman ran up to him at once and inquired whence he came.  “I am come from Kailasa,"[10] said he; “having been sent down by an old couple living there, for news of their son and his wife.”  “Who are those fortunate dwellers in Siva’s mountain?” she asked.  And the rogue gave the names of her husband’s deceased parents, which he had taken good care, of course, to learn from the neighbours.  “Do you really come from them?” said the simple woman.  “Are they doing well there?  Dear old people!  How glad my husband would be to see you, were he here!  Sit down, please, and