We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or other shape of _Syntipas_. If it was, did the change come in the Latin handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the version worked on by Marie had a _popular_ origin, whether derived by oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which had filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit? There seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no mediaeval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale in _Syntipas_ and its derivatives, though Marie would not have rhymed that offensive _conte_ if she had met with it in the English collection. Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of _The Three Wishes_ among backward and remote races, American or African. If such a version were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might argue that the tale was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as told in _Pantschatantra_, to make it seem essentially and peculiarly Indian, and incapable of having been invented elsewhere. A fourteenth-century version (quoted by M. Deulin from _Fabliaux et Contes_ published by St. Meon, vol. iv. p. 386) amplifies all that is least refined in _Sendabar_ and in _Sindibad_. St. Martin grants the wishes, there are four of them, and nobody is one penny the better. With Philippe de Vigneules (1505-1514, the seventy-eighth of his hundred _Nouvelles_), God grants three wishes to a wedded pair. The woman wishes a new leg for her pot, the man wishes her _le pied au ventre_, and then wishes it back again. M. Deulin found this form in living popular tradition, at Leuze in Hainaut. The _Souhaits_ of La Fontaine (_Fables_, vii. 6) has this peculiarity, that the giver of the wishes, as in Marie de France and in _Sindibad_, is a Follet or brownie, or familiar spirit, obliged to leave his friends. He offers them three wishes; first, they ask for wealth and are embarrassed by their riches, then for a restoration of their mediocrity, then for wisdom. 'C'est un tresor qui n'embarrasse point.' La Fontaine's source is obscure; had he known _Syntipas_, he might (or might not) have introduced the story among his _Contes_. Perhaps it was too rude even for that unabashed collection.