FISHES IN FABLE AND FAIRY-TALE. 51 



from another, concludes it is always the same old tor- 

 toise, and flies off in disgust. But this is exceptional, for 

 the tortoise as a rule is a fool. He begs eagles to take him 

 up into the sky, " to see the world," and gets dropped on to 

 rocks and eaten in return for his misplaced confidence. 

 He pretends he will tell the king of the birds a great secret 

 if he will carry him over a range of mountains, and is made 

 half-way to tell his secret, and then, as usual, dropped on 

 to the customary rock. So again when his good friends 

 the wild geese are carrying him to the Golden Cave on the 

 Himalaya Mountains, the people of a town over which they 

 pass, go into fits of laughter at seeing two geese with the 

 ends of a stick in their beaks and a tortoise hanging down 

 by his mouth from the middle. The tortoise cannot resist 

 the opportunity for a retort, but he has hardly got the first 

 word out of his mouth when down he comes smash on the 

 ground. 



Flat-fish, again, have a distinctive character, their gro- 

 tesque facial arrangements suggesting superciliousness, and 

 a general kind of wry-mouthed ill-nature. The fluke, 

 therefore, gets its mouth twisted round for sneering at the 

 coronation of the herring : in Grimm it is the sole, and 

 elsewhere the plaice ; while all the flat-fish are flattened 

 out for being disagreeable, the rays for stinging a god when 

 out fishing, and the turbot for upsetting a nymph it was 

 carrying, and so forth. But with these few exceptions the 

 fishes of fable are simply foolish folk. 



In fairy-tale they are invariably benign. Thus in the 

 admirable Red Indian story of " Sheem, the Forsaken Boy." 

 the sturgeon that saves Owasso plays a beneficent part. 

 The wicked old magician, his father-in-law, takes him out 

 fishing, and just as Owasso is about to spear the sturgeon, 

 he makes his enchanted boat dart away from under the 



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