Some Mouse-deer Tales. 



ByR. V. WlNSEDTT. 



These tales of Si Kvnchil or Si Plandok were copied down 

 by me almost word for word from the narrative of a Malacca 

 Malay, whom I met casually in Perak. He was a man some 

 thirty years old and he told me he had heard the tales as a 

 boy from a Javanese settler in Malacca, who translated them 

 for the pleasure of his Malay acquaintances from a thicR 

 Javanese book : he added that the book was in manuscript and 

 looked old. His recital was racy and colloquial and had none 

 of the artifice and literary graces of the professional rhapsodists. 

 He said, he could only remember a few tales. These are they : 

 tales of the Mouse-deer, his wit and the carking cunning 

 " which keeps his body so thin and his eyes so large and 

 bright." 



I once narrated the first of my tales to some Kuala Kang- 

 sar boatmen on the Perak River, and they capped it with a 

 story of identical moral, where however it is a man who 

 releases a tiger from a trap and the tiger in return threatens 

 to devour the man, and a river-bank is called upon and attests 

 the ingratitude of men and beasts ; till at last the mouse-deer 

 lures the tiger into the trap again, to see how the man can 

 release him ! These same boatmen substituted the phrase 

 "Nabi Sleyman's belt, tali ping gang" for " Nabi Sleyman's 

 turban " in the story of the mouse-deer with the snake and the 

 tiger. Apparently, many Mouse-deer tales are told, of the 

 same gist but with slightly different dress : and this is only to 

 be expected, when they are circulated merely from lip to lip. 

 I have not got the book by me and my memory may play me 

 pranks : but, so far as I can remember, the tale of the mouse- 

 deer enticing the lion into a well to fight his own shadow, which 

 appears in the Hikaiat Gelila Demina, appears in a slightly 

 different shape in Mr. Skeat's little book of folk-lore tales. 



B. A. Soc, No. 45, 1905. 



