Notes.
I know of no complete analogues of this droll; but partial variants, both serious and comic, are numerous. In our story a penniless, unscrupulous hero finds a centavo, and by means of sophistical arguments with foolish persons makes more and more profitable exchanges until he wins the hand of a princess. A serious tale of a clever person starting with no greater capital than a dead mouse, and finally succeeding in making a fortune, is the “Cullaka-seṭṭhi-jātaka,” No. 4. This story subsequently made its way into Somadeva’s great collection (Tawney, 1 : 33–34), “The Story of the Mouse Merchant” (ch. VI). Here it runs approximately as follows:—
A poor youth, whose mother managed to give him some education in writing and ciphering, was advised by her to go to a certain rich merchant who was in the habit of lending capital to poor men of good family. The youth went; and, just as he entered the house, that rich man was angrily talking to another merchant’s son: “You see this dead mouse here upon the floor; even that is a commodity by which a capable man would acquire wealth; but I gave you, you good-for-nothing fellow, many dinars, and, so far from increasing them, you have not even been able to preserve what you got.” The poor stranger-youth at once said to the merchant that he would take the dead mouse as capital advanced, and he wrote a receipt for it. He sold the mouse as cat-meat to a certain merchant for two handfuls of gram. Next he made meal of the gram, and, taking his stand by the road, civilly offered food and drink to a band of wood-cutters that came by. Each, out of gratitude, gave him two pieces of wood. This wood he sold, bought more gram with a part of the price, and obtained more wood from the wood-cutters the next day, etc., until he was able in time to buy all their wood for three days. Heavy rains made a dearth of wood, and he sold his stock for a large sum. Then he set up a shop, began to traffic, and became wealthy by his own ability. Now he had a golden mouse made, which he sent to the rich merchant from whom he had gotten his start, and that merchant bestowed the hand of his daughter on the once poor youth.
The comic atmosphere, it will be seen, is altogether absent from this Buddhistic parable.
A slight resemblance to our story may be traced in Bompas, No. XLIX, “The Foolish Sons,” where the clever youngest (of six brothers) manages to acquire ten rupees, starting with one anna. He proceeds by “borrowing,” and paying interest in advance. The trick used here is the same as that practised on the foolish wife in “Wise Folks” (Grimm, No. 104), where a sharper buys three cows, and leaves one with the seller as a pledge for the price of the three (see Bolte-Polívka, 2 : 440 f.).
Much closer parallels than the preceding, to the incidents of out story, are to be found in a cycle of tales discussed by Bolte-Polívka (2 : 201–202) in connection with “Hans in Luck” (Grimm, No. 83). It will be recalled that in the Grimm story the foolish Hans exchanges successively gold for horse, horse for cow, cow for pig, pig for goose, goose for grindstone, which he is finally glad to get rid of by throwing it into the water. “A counterpart of this story,” say Bolte and Polívka, “is the Märchen of the ‘profitable exchange,’ in which a poor man acquires from another a hen because it has eaten up a pea or millet-seed that belonged to him; for the hen he gets a pig which has killed it; for the pig, a cow; for the cow, a horse. But when he finally levies his claim for damages upon a girl, and places her in a sack, his luck changes: strangers liberate the maiden without the knowledge of her captor, and put in her place a big dog, which falls upon him when he opens the sack.” It is to be noted that the cycle as here outlined consists really of two parts,—the “biter biting” and the “biter bit.” Cosquin (2 : 209) believes that the last two episodes—the maiden gained by chicanery, and the substitution of an animal for her in the sack—form a separate theme not originally a part of the cumulative motive; and, to prove his belief, he cites a number of Oriental tales containing the former, but lacking the cumulative motive (ibid., 209–212). Cosquin seems to be correct in this; although, on the other hand, he is able to cite only one story (Rivière, p. 95) in which there is not some trace of the “biter-bit” idea. Moreover, even in the animal stories belonging to this group,—and he analyzes Stokes, No. 17, and Rivière, p. 79,—the animal-rogue meets with an unlucky end. The same is true of Steel-Temple, No. 2, “The Rat’s Wedding.” In another Indian story, however, “The Monkey with the Tom-Tom” (Kingscote, No. XIV, a rather pointless tale), the monkey, whose last exchange is puddings for a tom-tom, is left at the top of a tree lustily beating his drum and enumerating his clever tricks. A very similar story is to be found in Rouse, p. 132, “The Monkey’s Bargains.” It will thus be seen that Bolte and Polívka’s analysis holds for the larger number of human hero tales of this cycle, as well as for the animal tales; but that the first half of the sequence of events, where the hero’s good luck is continually on the increase, is also to be found as a separate story,—Kingscote’s, Rouse’s, and our own.
The Filipino version appears to be old, and I am inclined to think that it is native; that is, if any stories may be called native. Several facts point to the primitiveness of the tale: (1) the local color and realistic touches, slight though they are; (2) the non-emphasis of the comic possibilities of the situations; (3) the somewhat unsystematic arrangement of incidents, the third demand and exchange (iron rod for dead dog) not appearing to be an upward progression; (4) the crudity of invention displayed in this same third exchange (though an iron-picketed fence seems modern). My reasons for thinking our story not imported from the Occident are the differences in beginning, middle, and end between it and the European versions cited by Bolte-Polívka (loc. cit.). The good luck coming to the hero from the exchange of dead animals suggests a distant basic connection between our story and the “Jātaka,” although it must be admitted that the idea could occur independently to many different peoples.