as though he wished to pass them stealthily, and when they catch the horse’s bridle, he runs off leaving the men to drink themselves to sleep, and then returning takes away the wright’s body. This exploit is followed by others which occur in no other version; but the final scene is a feast, at which, according to the Seanagal’s prediction, the Shifty Lad asks the king’s daughter to dance. The Seanagal upon this puts a black mark upon him, but the lad, like Morgiana in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” discovering the mark, puts another on the Seanagal and on twenty other men besides him. The king is then advised to say that the man who had done all these tricks, that had been so well done, must be exceedingly clever, and that if he would come forward and give himself up he should have the princess for his wife. All the marked men accordingly claim the prize; and the craft of the Shifty Lad is once more called into practice, to secure the maiden for himself. From the comparison of these popular tales with each other we can see their common origin. Nations so widely separated as the Norsemen, Hindoos, Spaniards, Egyptians and the early inhabitants of Scotland, could not have borrowed these stories from each other. Their resemblances--a thief of wonderful cunning, his successes and escapes, and final honor--all point to the fact that they are but different versions of the same story. This one story could not have been communicated by one nation to the others, and as the only way to account for the resemblances we are shut up to believe that the nations long ago all lived in one home, from which they afterward separated to go to the different lands of their final settlements. When we add to this evidence, that from the sameness in the ideas of God held by the different nations in their descriptions of His power, and even in the very names by which they designated God, we are carried back to the early worship of the race, and we see from all these evidences that, originally, man worshiped one God. The human race did not begin life on the earth as a savage, or as a child, and was not developed from this condition to a higher state of intelligence; but man began life as a full-formed, mature, intelligent creature. From this high vantage ground he has descended, first, to the worship of many gods, and later on, of idols.