The following American forms of the accumulative story may be noted: Guatemala (JAFL 31 : 482–483); Mexico (JAFL 25 : 219 f.); Oaxaca (Radin-Espinosa, 195, No. 99); New-Mexican Spanish (JAFL 27 : 138); Tepecano (JAFL 27 : 175). See also Thompson, 453–454. The stories resemble ours only in general method, not at all in detail. For discussion and abstracts of some South American variants that are closer to our form than are those of Central and North America, see Boas (JAFL 25 : 352–353 and notes).
A curious Sinhalese accumulative story, No. 251 in Parker’s collection (3 : 336–338), tells how, when some robbers were apprehended for digging into the king’s palace and were sentenced, they replied that the mason who made the walls was at fault, not they. The mason accused his lime-mixer; the lime-mixer, a beautiful woman for having distracted his attention; the woman, a goldsmith. The goldsmith is condemned, but by a ruse succeeds in getting a wholly innocent fat-bellied Mohammedan trader executed in his place. Parker abstracts a similar story from southern India (p. 338). (See also his No. 28 [1 : 201–205] for another kind of “clock-story” nearer the type of “The Old Woman and her Pig.”)
[61].
Page 392. Parker’s No. 107 (2 : 146–149) is an elaboration of Jātaka, No. 374. (For other Oriental variants of this theme, see ibid., 149–150.)
[71].
For a Negro version of a flight-contest (not etiological) between a crow and a pigeon, see MAFLS 13 : No. 53.
[79].
The Upper Thompson Indians have a story of how the raven and the crow were sent out after the Flood to find land. They did not return, but fed on the corpses of the drowned people. For this reason they were transformed into birds of black color, where formerly they were white-skinned (JAFL 29 : 329).
[82].
For bibliography of the relay-race motif among the American Indians see Boas (JAFL 25 : 249; Thompson, 448–449). Thompson cites fourteen American Indian versions, in all but two of which the winner is the turtle. In one, the clever animal is a gopher; in the other, a frog. For American Negro variants, see Thompson, 441; JAFL 31 : 221 (note 2); JAFL 32 : 394. In a Negro version from Bahamas (MAFLS 13 : No. 54), horse and conch race; horse is defeated, and kicks the little conches to death (cf. the ending of our No. 82). For a Mexican version (rabbit and toad) see JAFL 25 : 214–215; for Oaxaca (toad and deer), Radin-Espinosa, 193.