Here we have another instance of a youth falling in love with the portrait of a pretty girl (see _ante_, p. 328). The doughty deeds performed by the young prince against thousands of his foes throw into the shade the exploits of the Bedouin hero Antar, and those of our own famous champions Sir Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis of Hampton. _ADDITIONAL NOTES._ FIRUZ AND HIS WIFE, _p. 301_. I find yet another variant of this story in my small MS. collection of Arabian and Persian anecdotes, translated from the French (I have not ascertained its source): They relate that a lord of Basra, while walking one day in his garden, saw the wife of his gardener, who was very beautiful and virtuous. He gave a commission to his gardener which required him to leave his home. He then said to his wife, “Go and shut all the doors.” She went out and soon returned, saying, “I have shut all the doors except one, which I am unable to shut.” The lord asked, “And where is that door?” She replied, “That which is between you and the respect due to your Maker: there is no way of closing it.” When the lord heard these words, he asked the woman’s pardon, and became a better and a wiser man. We have here a unique form of the wide-spread tale of “The Lion’s Track,” which, while it omits the husband’s part, yet reflects the virtuous wife’s rebuke of the enamoured sultan. THE SINGER AND THE DRUGGIST, _p. 305_. If Straparola’s version is to be considered as an adaptation of Ser Giovanni’s novella—which I do not think very probable—it must be allowed to be an improvement on his model. In the Arabian story the singer is first concealed in a mat, next in the oven, and again in the mat, after which he escapes by clambering over the parapet of the druggist’s roof to that of an adjoining house, and his subsequent adventures seem to be added from a different story. In Ser Giovanni’s version the lover is first hid beneath a heap of half-dried clothes, and next behind the street door, from which he escapes the instant the husband enters, and the latter is treated as a madman by the wife’s relatives and the neighbours—an incident which has parallels in other tales of women’s craft and its prototype, perhaps, in the story of the man who compiled a book of the Wiles of Woman, as told in “Syntipas,” the Greek version of the Book of Sindibad. In Straparola the lover—as in the Arabian story—is concealed three times, first in a basket, then between two boardings, and lastly in a chest containing law papers; and the husband induces him to recount his adventures in presence of the lady’s friends, which having concluded, the lover declares the story to be wholly fictitious: this is a much more agreeable ending than that of Giovanni’s story, and, moreover, it bears a close analogy to the latter part of the Persian tale, where the lover exclaims he is right glad to find it all a dream.