And the next morning the king gave three hundred thousand gold pieces to those three fastidious men, because they were persons of wonderful discernment and refinement. And they remained in great comfort in the king’s court, forgetting all about the turtle, and little did they reck of the fact that they had incurred sin by obstructing their father’s sacrifice.[501] * * * * * The story of the brothers who were so very “knowing” is common to most countries, with occasional local modifications. It is not often we find the knowledge of the “quintessence of things” concentrated in a single individual, as in the case of the ex-king of our tale, but we have his exact counterpart—and the circumstance is significant—in No. 2 of the “Cento Novelle Antiche,” the first Italian collection of short stories, made in the 13th century, where a prisoner informs the king of Greece that a certain horse has been suckled by a she-ass, that a jewel contains a flaw, and that the king himself is a baker. Mr. Tawney, in a note on the Vetála story, as above, refers also to the decisions of Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in Simrock’s “Quellen des Shakespeare,” 1, 81–85; 5, 170; he lays down that some bread tastes of blood (the corn was grown on a battlefield); that some liquor tastes of iron (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well, in which some rusty swords had lain); that some bacon tastes of corpses (the pig had eaten a corpse); lastly, that the king is a servant and his wife a serving-maid. But in most versions of the story three brothers are the gifted heroes. In “Mélusine”[502] for 5 Nov. 1885, M. René Basset cites an interesting variant (in which, as is often the case, the “Lost Camel” plays a part, but we are not concerned about it at present) from Radloft’s “Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stamme des Süd-Siberiens,” as follows: SIBERIAN VERSION.