52 FISHES OF FANCY 



striker's feet, and the young man falls into the water. 

 But the sturgeon magnanimously carries Owasso to the 

 shore (where it gets cooked and eaten for its pains), and 

 bye-and-bye the wicked Manito comes to well-merited grief 

 at his son-in-law's hands. Again, in the story of " The 

 Little Spirit, or Boy-man," the main incidents are fish ones. 

 The boy-man steals the fish of the giant brothers, and 

 incurs their dislike, and then upsets them by a stratagem 

 into a fishing-hole in the ice, and so kindles their dislike 

 into wrath. But he outwits them, and takes refuge inside 

 a fish which he calls to his assistance, but which he after- 

 wards betrays and eats. 



In Portuguese folk-tale the recurrence of the fish-figure 

 is very marked, and always in the same benign aspect. Thus 

 in the story of the Baker's Idle Son (that has its well-known 

 Russian and German counterparts), the fish that comes up 

 to him in the wood to eat his crumbs, and though caught 

 by the boy, is released when it begs for its life, continues 

 to befriend him till his fortunes are completed : the good 

 daughter of the wicked witch takes the form of an eel, to 

 assist the prince ; a whale, at the cost of its own life, rescues 

 the maiden from whose head the pearls used to fall when 

 she combed her hair ; in the Portuguese version of Cin- 

 derella — the Hearth-cat, as she is called — it is a fish which 

 plays the part of the good fairy or the white pigeons ; 

 St. Peter makes use of a fish to save his little god- 

 daughter from death ; a beautiful fish is caught, and sub- 

 mits to being sliced up into pieces, for the aggrandise- 

 ment and future welfare of the family of his captor. This 

 last story is one of many that are common to the nurseries 

 of the whole world. In the tale of the Gold Children, 

 the golden fish that is cut up into six pieces, to the great 

 good fortune of the fisherman and his family, is the same 



