‘ “You see, mates, it was once upon a time, and a very good time it was, a young man, and he runned away, and got along with a gang of thieves, and he went to a gentleman’s house, and got in because one of his mates sweethearted the servant, and got her away, and she left the door open. And the door being left open, the young man got in, and robbed the house of a lot of money, £1000, and he took it to their gang at the cave. Next day there was a reward out to find the robber. Nobody found him. So the gentleman put two men and a horse in a field, and the men were hidden in the field, and the gentleman put out a notice that anybody that could catch the horse should have him for his cleverness, and a reward as well; for he thought the man that got the £1000 was sure to try to catch that there horse, because he was so bold and clever, and then the two men hid would nab him. This here Jack (that’s the young man) was watching, and he saw the two men, and he went and caught two live hares. Then he hid himself behind a hedge, and let one hare go, and one man said to the other, ‘There goes a hare,’ and they both ran after it, not thinking Jack’s there. And while they were running he let go t’other one, and they said, ‘There’s another hare,’ and they ran different ways, and so Jack went and got the horse, and took it to the man that offered the reward, and got the reward; it was £100; and the gentleman said, ‘D—— it, Jack’s done me this time.’ The gentleman then wanted to serve out the parson, and he said to Jack, ‘I’ll give you another £100 if you’ll do something to the parson as bad as you’ve done to me.’ Jack said, ‘Well, I will’; and Jack went to the church and lighted up the lamps and rang the bells, and the parson he got up to see what was up. Jack was standing in one of the pews like an angel; when the parson got to the church, Jack said, ‘Go and put your plate in a bag; I’m an angel come to take you up to heaven.’ And the parson did so, and it was as much as he could drag to church from his house in a bag; for he was very rich. And when he got to church Jack put the parson in one bag, and the money stayed in the other; and he tied them both together, and put them across his horse, and took them up hill and through water to the gentleman’s, and then he took the parson out of the bag, and the parson was wringing wet. Jack fetched the gentleman, and the gentleman gave the parson a horsewhipping, and the parson cut away, and Jack got all the parson’s money and the second £100, and gave it all to the poor. And the parson brought an action against the gentleman for horsewhipping him, and they were both ruined. That’s the end of it. That’s the sort of story that’s liked best, sir.” ’
Dasent, ‘The Master Thief’ (Tales from the Norse, p. 255). He [[51]]takes service with robbers. Steals three oxen, the first one by a shoe here and a shoe there, the third by imitating lost ox. He steals the squire’s roast, first catching three hares alive. He steals Father Laurence in a sack, but not out of church, posing as an angel, and bidding him lay out all his gold and silver. N.B. No crabs, no lighting of candles.
Grimm, No. 192, ‘The Master Thief’ (ii. 324). He steals horse from under rider. Steals sheet from under count’s wife, first luring count away by means of corpse. Disguised like monk, he steals parson and clerk out of church in sack, bumping them against steps, and dragging them through puddles—‘mountains’ and ‘clouds.’ No mention of plate or money. Neither of these two versions can be the original of Mayhew’s English vagrant one.
Straparola (Venice, 1550), No. 2, ‘The Knave.’ First, he steals from the provost the bed on which he is lying; next, horse on which stable-boy is sitting; and thirdly, an ecclesiastical personage in sack.
De Gubernatis (Zool. Myth., i. 204) alludes to the famous robber Klimka, in Afanasief, v. 6, who, by means of a drum (in Indian tales a trumpet) terrifies his accomplices, the robbers, and then steals from a gentleman his horse, his jewel-casket, even his wife.
‘Les Deux Voleurs’ (Dozon’s Contes Albanais, p. 169) has two thieves with the same mistress, as in Barbu Constantinescu. One of them, posing as the angel Gabriel, steals the cadi in a chest at the instigation of a pasha whom the cadi has ridiculed.
Much more striking are the analogies offered by ‘Voleur par Nature’ (Legrand’s Contes Grecs, p. 205) from Cyprus. Here we get the stealing of two sheep, first by a boot here and a boot there, and next by baaing like a lost sheep. Then we have the stealing of one of a yoke of oxen, the robbery of the king’s treasure-house, the consulting a robber in prison, a caldron of pitch, the headless robber, the exposure of his corpse, and, lastly, the marriage of the surviving thief and the princess.
For heroic form of ‘The Master Thief’ see Hahn’s No. 3, ‘Von dem Schönen und vom Drakos.’ Hero has to steal winged horse of the dragon, coverlet of dragon’s bed, and the dragon himself. He steals him in a box, and marries the king’s daughter. In Laura Gonzenbach’s most curious Sicilian story, No. 83, ‘Die Geschichte von Caruseddu’ (ii. 142–145), the hero steals the horse of the ‘dragu’ (? dragon, rather than cannibal), next his bed-cover, and lastly the ‘dragu’ himself; with which compare the Bukowina-Gypsy story, ‘Tropsyn,’ No. 27. In Hahn, ii. p. 182, we have mention of sack, in variant 4 of ring of the dragon. Cf. infra, p. 109.
Finally, three little points connecting the Gypsies and the ‘Master Thief’ may be noted. Mrs. Carlyle’s ‘mother’s mother was a grand-niece of Matthew Baillie,’ a famous Scottish Gypsy, who, as she said, ‘could steal a horse from under the owner, if he liked, but left always the saddle and bridle.’ John MacDonald, travelling tinker, ‘knew the story of the “Shifty Lad,” though not well enough to repeat it’ (Campbell’s Tales of the West Highlands, i. 142, 356). An English Gypsy once said [[52]]to me, ‘The folks hereabouts are a lot of rátfalo heathens; they all think they’re going to heaven in a sack.’
Dr. Barbu Constantinescu’s ‘Two Thieves’ is so curious a combination of the ‘Rhampsinitus’ story in Herodotus and of Grimm’s ‘Master Thief,’ that I am more than inclined to regard it as the lost original which, according to Campbell of Islay, ‘it were vain to look for in any modern work or in any modern age.’ The ‘Rhampsinitus’ story and the ‘Master Thief’ have both been made special subjects of study—the former by Reinhold Köhler in Orient und Occident, 1864, pp. 303–316, by Clouston in his Popular Tales and Fictions (1887, ii. 115–165), and by Sir George Cox in Fraser’s Magazine (July 1880, pp. 96–111); the latter by M. Cosquin in Contes Populaires de Lorraine (1887; ii. 271–281, 364–5). With their help and that of the above jottings, we can analyse the Gypsy story of the ‘Two Thieves’ detail by detail, and see in how many and how widely-separated non-Gypsy versions some of those details have to be sought:—
(1) A town thief meets a country thief, and is challenged by him to steal the eggs of a magpie without her noticing it.—Grimm, No. 129, and Kashmir and Kabyle versions. (2) Whilst doing so, he is himself robbed unawares of his breeches by the country thief. The stealing of the labourer’s paijámas in Kashmir version is analogous. (3) They enter into partnership, and have one wife.—Albanian version. (4) They go to the king’s palace, and, making a hole in the roof, descend and steal money. The king, discovering his loss, takes counsel with an old robber in prison.—So in Dolopathos, modern Greek, and Cypriote versions. (5) By his advice the king finds out hole by lighting a fire in the treasure-house, and noticing where the smoke escapes.—Dolopathos, Pecorone, old French, Breton, old Dutch, Danish, Kabyle. (6) Under the hole he sets a cask of molasses.—Snare in ‘Rhampsinitus,’ Tyrolese, Kabyle; pitch in old English, modern Greek, Cypriote, old French, Gaelic, old Dutch, Danish. (7) The country thief is caught, and his comrade cuts off his head.—‘Rhampsinitus,’ Pecorone, old English, old French, Breton, Gaelic, Tyrolese, Danish, Kabyle, Tibetan, Cinghalese. (8) The headless trunk is exposed, and the comrade steals it by intoxicating the guards.—‘Rhampsinitus,’ Sicilian, Breton, Gaelic, old Dutch, Russian. (9) He further cheats them of 400 groats as payment for his horse, which he pretends the dead thief has stolen.—Wanting elsewhere. (10) The king then puts a prohibitive price on all the meat in the city, thinking the thief will betray himself by alone being able to pay it; but the thief steals a joint.—Italian (Pecorone, 1378, ix. 1; and Prof. Crane’s Italian Popular Tales, p. 166). (11) The king finally makes a proclamation, offering his daughter to the thief, who plucks up courage and reveals himself.—‘Rhampsinitus,’ Pecorone, Sicilian, modern Greek, Tyrolese, Kabyle. (12) To exhibit his skill, he steals one of a yoke of oxen.—Russian (De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, i. 186, from Afanasief). (13) As a further test he steals the priest out of the church in a sack, out of which he has just let 300 crabs, each with a lighted taper fastened to its claw. According to Cosquin, the complete crab episode occurs only in Grimm (he of [[53]]course knows nothing of our Gypsy version). But herein he for once is wrong, since we find it also in Krauss’s Croatian version of the ‘Master Thief’ (No. 55), which bears the title of ‘The Lad who was up to Gypsy Tricks’; its hero, indeed, is generally styled ‘the Gypsy.’ He is a Gypsy in Dr. Friedrich Müller’s Gypsy variant, and in Dr. von Sowa’s. In the latter version, as in several non-Gypsy ones, the hero, it will be noticed, catches crabs, but makes no use whatever of them afterwards.
No. 13.—The Watchmaker
There was once a poor lad. He took the road, went to find himself a master. He met a priest on the road.
‘Where are you going, my lad?’
‘I am going to find myself a master.’
‘Mine’s the very place for you, my lad, for I’ve another lad like you, and I have six oxen and a plough. Do you enter my service and plough all this field.’
The lad arose, and took the plough and the oxen, and went into the fields and ploughed two days. Luck[19] and the Ogre came to him. And the Ogre said to Luck, ‘Go for him.’ Luck didn’t want to go for him; only the Ogre went. When the Ogre went for him, he laid himself down on his back, and unlaced his boots, and took to flight across the plain.
The other lad shouted after him, ‘Don’t go, brother; don’t go, brother.’
‘Bah! God blast your plough and you as well.’